Gatsby's Green Light in 2008

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is, of course, one of the absolute masterpieces of American literature. We all know the story (or should) about the poor North Dakota boy made Long Island millionaire (thanks to bootlegging) whose love for Daisy, "the golden girl", eventually destroys him. We all read it in high school so for many of us this novel reminds us of homework and book reports. But reading it again, one cannot help but be overpowered by the beauty of its words and themes.

This article from today's New York Times shows how this novel is still relevant today. Specifically, it concentrates on the central image of the green light, shining from Daisy's dock across the water, beckoning to Gatsby. Like the Mississippi River in Huckleberry Finn, taking Jim and Huck to freedom and exposing the madness and sheer idiocy of racism and slavery, the green light in many ways encapsulates America.

Fitzgerald, through the narrator Nick, sums up how the green light represents all the contradictory yearnings of the American dream. In the novel's closing passages, he writes:

... I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.
It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further ... And one fine morning -

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.