The lavish mansion, a flamboyant Rolls Royce and a snazzy pink suit, what’s there about, not to love Gatsby? He should be the epitome of the American dream, the single most hopeful person who earned everything there is to earn in this world, wealth, love and respect. Coming from a poor family with parents as farmers, he built everything from scratch. There is nothing Gatsby hadn’t dreamed to pursue with his gift for hope. But the central purpose behind his arriviste was the pursuit of love. Love for daisy, a fresh beauty of the Jazz era, who bolted herself in Gatsby’s heart in her hometown Louisville and became the muse of Gatsby’s dreams and raison d’etre of Gatsby’s life.
Whatever he earned, the focus was only one- Daisy. He threw magnificent parties with practically no guest list every weekend so that one day Daisy walks through his door. He bought his mansion just across the bay from daisy’s home, where he could see a green light on her dock, symbol of all his yearning.
“He stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way, and …distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away…”
Set against the backdrop of the Jazz Age, in the decade of the 1920s, Nick Carraway, also a veteran of World War I, like Gatsby, narrates the story of Gatsby when he moves beside him.
My perspective might be a little different when I say it’s the story of clash of class, of virtue and artifice, of the real and the imaginary.
“Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace…they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing”
Gatsby imagined and hoped that by amassing such wealth, he can get entitled to deserve some beauty like Daisy. Daisy on the other hand, though claimed to have been in love with Gatsby, seemed to fall out with him when she realized Gatsby might have earned everything by unfair means and went back into the arms of a husband, with an aristocratic breeding, with no virtues visible except for the virtue of wealth, one who now didn’t really love Daisy and had a mistress as well. Poor Gatsby! His fairy-tale love is overshadowed by the abyss of this world’s artifice!
“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 farther….”
