The Great Gatsby Page #39

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922

• Fiction
• Novel

								

me and grabbed my arm.

“I told him the truth,” he said. “He came to the door while we were
getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren’t in
he tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if
I hadn’t told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his
pocket every minute he was in the house—” He broke off defiantly.
“What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw
dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough
one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even
stopped his car.”

There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it
wasn’t true.

“And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering—look here, when
I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits
sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By
God it was awful—”

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done
was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and
confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up
things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their
vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let
other people clean up the mess they had made …

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as
though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewellery
store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff
buttons—rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had
grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never
took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and
pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to
East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story
about it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when
I got off the train.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming,
dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still
hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden,
and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a
material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I
didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away
at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer,
I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once
more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a
piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it,
drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the
beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any
lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the
Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to
melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that
flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new
world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s
house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all
human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his
breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the
last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for
wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of
Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of
Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream
must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He
did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that
vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic
rolled on under the night.

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 further … And
one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past.
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