(anyone who read the book) HELP?

Hi

I got this from Rudius Media about that particular passage:

This is the definitive line from Carraway in Gatsby. It's the one that puts the hero label on Jay, instead of bootlegger or fake or socialite. We find that the American dream was still very much alive inside him, but at the same time, that such innocence is not long for this world. Fitzgerald defined that age with his anti-hero, and made a bold statement by killing him off. You'll find this idea shamelessly imitated time and time again from 'Scarface' to 'Hustle and Flow.'


Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among stars.

Hope this isn't too late for your assignment...

Gatsby is a romantic character through and through. He channeled all of his considerable energy into a single goal: get rich, and get Daisy. It seemed so simple to him, so logical and so straightforward that once he met Daisy in Nick's living room, the dream was within his grasp. Everything he had done up until that point was done with Daisy in mind.

But remember the night of Myrtle's death, he waited, and waited, and waited...he wanted to be Daisy's knight, to rescue her from her brute of a husband and the life he was certain she didn't want. He had invested everything in the dream of her, completely blinded to the reality that he couldn't come and sweep Daisy away, that it was all a beautiful dream but nothing more than smoke and cloud. She never gave him the signal he told her to give (turning the light on and off), and finally, he realized that she never would, that she never intended to to begin with.

That quote comes from the last few moments of Gatsby's life, the moments that he was floating in the pool before he is shot by Wilson. Nick is imagining that his last few moments were spent contemplating how he had thrown away his life on a worthless dream that would go nowhere. Now he was seeing life the way it really was, how messy it was and painful. The difference is the last line--the "ashen figure moving through the trees" was real. It was Wilson, moving toward him with purpose, ready to end his life just as he was realizing what it was.

Ignore the trolls!