"The Great Gatsby," In Review

First off, I hold to my statement made in the previous blog post that this book is still by far one of the best that I have ever read. One simply cannot deny the perfection of Fitzgerald's prose. This being said, the last couple of chapters did not disappoint.

The story climaxes in the death of Gatsby after he has had his heart broken by his long time lover, Daisy. The most moving scene comes from Nick's description of what must have happened as Gatsby approached his pool:

"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 amorphous trees."

This scene describes how Gatsby's world falls in on him as he sees that everything that his life had revolved around for four years has been for nought. While sad, this scene also alludes to the greater point that Fitzgerald was trying to make in this novel; that is how shallow the lives of this society really are. He describes this scene especially through the character of Gatsby, because as Nick explained in the first pages of the book, "Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn."