Nick's Vision In The Great Gatsby Essay

Title The final passage of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald speaks to Nick’s disappointment over loss of a kind of romantic vision which he believed. Gatsby embodies that vision, which Nick described as his “romantic readiness”, and that Gatsby’s death, and subsequently the failure of Nick’s belief in that romantic vision, is what causes Nick to desire a world at “moral attention” at the beginning of the novel (2). The fading of Nick’s romantic vision is brought on by both the death of Gatsby and Myrtle, and Daisy’s refusal of Gatsby’s love. Nick sees people not taking responsibility for their actions, as Daisy does, and where people don’t fulfill their dreams for love in a moral manner, shown through Tom’s affair with Myrtle. Nick’s

Nick imagines, ““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” (180). The trope of human corruption of nature is once again explored through the idea of “the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house”, as if nature itself is being corrupted through the process of being turned first into lumber and then into Gatsby’s house. However, the fact that the trees are the ones that had, “once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams” is far more important. It is clear that Nick imagines that the trees, and therefore nature and the purity of this virgin world, as the ones that inspired people to have profound dreams. However, because the trees are pandering, Nick implies that these pandered dreams are false. This creates an interesting dynamic because no does Nick imagine the “fresh, green breast” of this pure, unpeopled world, does he come to see the pandering trees as a corrupting force because they inspire dreams that can never be attained. “Enchanted” is an interesting choice to describe

Nick notes how he, “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” (180). Nick is equating the wonder of the Dutch looking out upon the pure, unpeople world of the past to Gatsby’s wonder at the time of the novel. This is important because it shows that Nick still recognizes people’s ability to have these dreams. Typically, Daisy and the green light are associated with the green of money, but upon further inspection, it seems much more plausible that the green light is an allusion to the “green” purity of nature described in the previous paragraph. Therefore, it is the green of the past brought forward and associated with Daisy in the present by Gatsby. The lawn is blue so as to differentiate it from the green of nature that is unsullied by human corruption; lawns are manicured and sculpted by humans, so they cannot possess the same innate purity of the “fresh, green breast”. Additionally, by standing on the blue lawn, Gatsby is living in a world that is corrupt, yet he can still see the purity of the green light. However, just like the Dutch could not