The message of this book is so heart-breaking and beautiful. My favorite part of the entire book is the last sentence. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Initially, I got very upset when I finished The Great Gatsby. Because the message is, as you said, we live these mundane, meaningless live; then we die. When Nick talks about Tom and Daisy the night after the accident, he says “They weren’t happy…and yet they weren’t unhappy either.” He follows this statement by saying that Gatsby spent the night “watching over nothing”. At first, his last statement seems to mean only that nothing happened between Tom and Daisy that night, but it’s deeper than that. Tom and Daisy were nothing. They were bound to each other still, but they had fizzled out. While they might have loved once, they now simply existed.
The same is true for Gatsby after he realizes that he has lost Daisy for good. He spent his whole life trying to reach her, and he finally gave up. He accepts that she’s not coming back and tries to make peace with it; then he dies. When no one came to Gatsby’s funeral, the message really sank in for me. Gatsby lived what’s considered the American Dream, but who really dreams of spending his or her entire life constantly reaching for more material things just to die? Sure, people attended Gatsby’s parties, but at the end of the day, Nick was the only person who really gave a damn about him. And I guess, when “the party [is] over”, that’s the bottom line. You can spend your life striving to obtain whatever you wish, but we all die. And when we die, none of it matters anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment