The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

By the end of the book, the reader’s empathy has burned to love. Young readers fall for Gatsby’s passion, his insistence that life should be relished, should be executed well. They have fallen in love with the persistence of his devotion to Daisy. I imagine they like to think they are capable of such a great love, one that smolders, lasting from year to year.

But Gatsby’s love for her girlhood means he can only hear the youth in her voice, and he is deaf to the age in her words.

This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

Men are all the same

Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks—at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed: “You promised!” into his ear.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

“Don’t be morbid,” Jordan said. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl.…

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

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.