Summary
Writing two years after Gatsby’s death, Nick describes
the events that surrounded the funeral. Swarms of reporters, journalists,
and gossipmongers descend on the mansion in the aftermath of the
murder. Wild, untrue stories, more exaggerated than the rumors about Gatsby
when he was throwing his parties, circulate about the nature of
Gatsby’s relationship to Myrtle and Wilson. Feeling that Gatsby would
not want to go through a funeral alone, Nick tries to hold a large
funeral for him, but all of Gatsby’s former friends and acquaintances
have either disappeared—Tom and Daisy, for instance, move away with
no forwarding address—or refuse to come, like Meyer Wolfshiem and
Klipspringer. The latter claims that he has a social engagement
in Westport and asks Nick to send along his tennis shoes. Outraged,
Nick hangs up on him. The only people to attend the funeral
are Nick, Owl Eyes, a few servants, and Gatsby’s father, Henry C.
Gatz, who has come all the way from Minnesota. Henry Gatz is proud
of his son and saves a picture of his house. He also fills Nick
in on Gatsby’s early life, showing him a book in which a young Gatsby
had written a schedule for self-improvement.
Sick of the East and its empty values, Nick decides to
move back to the Midwest. He breaks off his relationship with Jordan,
who suddenly claims that she has become engaged to another man.
Just before he leaves, Nick encounters Tom on Fifth Avenue in New York
City. Nick initially refuses to shake Tom’s hand but eventually accepts.
Tom tells him that he was the one who told Wilson that Gatsby owned
the car that killed Myrtle, and describes how greatly he suffered
when he had to give up the apartment he kept in the city for his
affair. He says that Gatsby deserved to die. Nick comes to the conclusion
that Tom and Daisy are careless and uncaring people and that they
destroy people and things, knowing that their money will shield
them from ever having to face any negative consequences.
Nick muses that, in some ways, this story is a story of
the West even though it has taken place entirely on the East Coast.
Nick, Jordan, Tom, and Daisy are all from west of the Appalachians,
and Nick believes that the reactions of each, himself included,
to living the fast-paced, lurid lifestyle of the East has shaped
his or her behavior. Nick remembers life in the Midwest, full of
snow, trains, and Christmas wreaths, and thinks that the East seems
grotesque and distorted by comparison.
On his last night in West Egg before moving back to Minnesota, Nick
walks over to Gatsby’s empty mansion and erases an obscene word
that someone has written on the steps. He sprawls out on the beach
behind Gatsby’s house and looks up. As the moon rises, he imagines
the island with no houses and considers what it must have looked
like to the explorers who discovered the New World centuries before.
He imagines that America was once a goal for dreamers and explorers,
just as Daisy was for Gatsby. He pictures the green land of America
as the green light shining from Daisy’s dock, and muses that Gatsby—whose
wealth and success so closely echo the American dream—failed to
realize that the dream had already ended, that his goals had become
hollow and empty. Nick senses that people everywhere are motivated
by similar dreams and by a desire to move forward into a future
in which their dreams are realized. Nick envisions their struggles
to create that future as boats moving in a body of water against
a current that inevitably carries them back into the past.
I see now that this has been a story
of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were
all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common
which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Analysis
Nick thinks of America not just as a nation but as a geographical entity,
land with distinct regions embodying contrasting sets of values.
The Midwest, he thinks, seems dreary and pedestrian compared to
the excitement of the East, but the East is merely a glittering
surface—it lacks the moral center of the Midwest. This fundamental moral
depravity dooms the characters of The Great Gatsby—all Westerners,
as Nick observes—to failure. The “quality of distortion” that lures
them to the East disgusts Nick and contributes to his decision to
move back to Minnesota.
There is another significance to the fact that all of
the major characters are Westerners, however. Throughout American
history, the West has been seen as a land of promise and possibility—the
very emblem of American ideals. Tom and Daisy, like other members
of the upper class, have betrayed America’s democratic ideals by
perpetuating a rigid class structure that excludes newcomers from
its upper reaches, much like the feudal aristocracy that America
had left behind. Gatsby, alone among Nick’s acquaintances, has the audacity
and nobility of spirit to dream of creating a radically different
future for himself, but his dream ends in failure for several reasons:
his methods are criminal, he can never gain acceptance into the American
aristocracy (which he would have to do to win Daisy), and his new
identity is largely an act. It is not at all clear what Gatsby’s
failure says about the dreams and aspirations of Americans generally,
but Fitzgerald’s novel certainly questions the idea of an America
in which all things are possible if one simply tries hard enough.
