The Great Gatsby

Chapter 8

            Chapter eight is rent with sorrow and woe.  It is here that we finally learn of Gatsby’s foundational fondness, as well as Daisy’s superficiality. 

“[Gatsby] had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself—that he was fully able to take care of her.  As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities—he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world” (p. 149).

Gatsby’s progression as a character stops when he is unable to achieve what he seeks.  A present reality, with which we all must cope, is that there are dreams, ambitions, and aspirations that we shall never attain.  The voice of the realist, unflatteringly speaks, his cold breath seeps into our dreams and taints the very hope of that dream.  Then, like a dying tree, the dream slowly stops.  It ceases to be. 

“I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared.  If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.  He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.  A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the anamorphous trees” (p161).

The dealings of this world upon our dreams prove that not all dreams come true.  That is reality.  That is life.  When life puts forth its sallow hand and pulls the vigor from our dreams, what we must do is carry on.  We must push back.  We must push forward.  Occasionally, however, our dreams transfer to realities.  Our life-like blueprint builds before our eyes.  We need rejoice in such moments, for fortune has smiled upon us.  The true tragedy is when our obsession becomes so encompassing, the quest for fantasy-turned realities becomes so engulfing, that we lose sight of any other present possibility.  If our lives are but broken things, dreams crashed on the rocks in the harbor, not even arriving to the ocean of actuality, then our progression halts.

Gatsby’s problems stem from the inability to move on.  Daisy gets married.  Gatsby should have stopped there.  But he doesn’t, he tries to push forward against an unalterable wall.  This wall is the past.  As stated in earlier entries, Gatsby believes that somehow, he is able to penetrate time and reach back into the recesses of yore.  What he should have done is discarded that dream for something new.  He is a talented person, he has a lot going for him; however, his monomania becomes his quick and unexpected downfall.  Gatsby slides into oblivion.