"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" (169).
Why can't I write like that? I really like Fitzgerald and I don't know why. He has been criticized as a poor writer with poor development. Yet, Gatsby is one of the few novels I have been required to read in school that I have finished and wanted to read again, if for nothing but to glean a little more wisdom from the text.
The quote above has struck me for about 5 years now. Every time I read it I feel like it is much more important than probably intended. I am in the process of writing a paper for my Lit class (on Gatsby of course) and I know I need to incorporate this excerpt and I am still juggling just how to make that work.
There is something about being so blind sighted by your dreams and ideals that when you finally look up from your plotting and scheming, you notice that there is a sky. Familiar to everyone but you. You realize things you once held dear become disgusting because they do not contain that magical sparkle you have created in your mind for so long. You are, in essence, entering a new world, "material without being real"... this is reality, you just haven't faced it in a long time.
I believe this is Gatsby's realization before death. He has no reason to live once he realizes all that he has dreamed has no ability to come true. He has built a life around a hope and a dream and his world is shattered. It almost seems as thought George Wilson's revenge of his wife was the very thing Gatsby needed or wanted. Daisy driving that car might have been the best thing to happen for dear Jay Gatz. So I'm writing and writing and I hope I get somewhere my professor considers new and unique.
1 comment:
my god, heather. you know how i feel about gatsby. i think part of what makes fitzgerald a phenomenal writer it that he taps into our humanity, often times the portions we're either not aware of or would be disinclined to admit to having. yet, it's always familiar. there's something altogether pitiful yet beautifully human about passages like that one. i think fitzgerald hits on things that we know are potentially present in ourselves but are completely ignorant as how to articulate. he paints tableaux of the psyche-- ephemeral and abstract realizations and states that never fail to knock the wind out of me.
i want to read your paper. :)
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