I have just finished reading Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It is a smooth going reading that entertained me for a sometime.
I finished it with two thoughts from Gatsby. My fear of loneliness, of dying alone, was triggered again by sad ending of Gatsby. No one was there for him, I am not concerned about the incredulous, meaningless way he died in, but that he was alone, no one there to bury him or say a prayer. No one to visit his grave. Does a dead person care about who visit him anyway? What does death really mean? Where are we after death. I know all the answers different religions have to give but I still haven't found an answer.
The second thought is wasting one's life in illusions. He wasted his life in the illusion of love. He worked hard to get all that money, in all ways but it felt he never really lived a single day. He enjoyed nothing. He lived all his life waiting till the moment of his death. He was just starting to look around, thinking that now I can start enjoying.
“At two o’clock Gatsby put on his bathing-suit and left word with the butler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at the pool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up. "
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“If that was true 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.”
And the book was concluded by
“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 farther… . And one fine morning..........
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Excerpt From: F. Scott Fitzgerald. “The Great Gatsby.”
This is what jWoman has to say.
