The Great Gatsby Essay

The symbol of water means time, as time goes on the more Gatsby and the human race wants to go back and fix the things that went wrong or didn’t benefit them the way they wanted a certain event to benefit them. Fitzgerald uses water to critique human society through our obsession of being at the top of successfulness and gaining time as if it were an object. Humanity has many regrets, and the only way to rectify something that has already happened is to recreate the past and recreate the event that didn’t go as planned.

“He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and…I could have sworn he was trembling.” Fitzgerald uses Gatsby as a representative for humanity desperately trying to regain lost time, in Gatsby’s case, gaining the five years he didn’t have with Daisy. All throughout the book Gatsby doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that time is unretainable and will always move forward whether he wants it to or not. Gatsby dies in the water while he waited for Daisy to call to confirm them running away together; she doesn’t call, a symbol that humanity cannot have what’s in the past as Gatsby cannot have the past relationship he had had with Daisy. This relates to the American dream as time cannot be regained and dreams cannot come true from the original idea coming from the past. People from the past had created this idea of the possibility of the American dream, as time progressed that dream was seemingly accomplished by many, but none who had ‘completed’ the dream was happy and made to carry the secret of the false identity of the American dream. Gatsby searches for love to complete his version of the American dream, he has all aspects of the dream but love, and so his new purpose was to find love through Daisy. One of the language devices Fitzgerald uses is an allusion, making the American dream something not solid, something that cannot be achieved in retrospect. He uses the American dream to critique society through time, of how far people would go to get their happy ending through the American dream. What we see in the book is Gatsby’s infatuation with Daisy, something Fitzgerald uses to critique society as a race with obsession. Humanity is driven by what they cannot have, absolute power and superiority through money, love, popularity, and successfulness. Gatsby thought himself among the elite, but the elite never accepted him because he had come into his money a different way, he had assumed he had his American dream planned out as the human race thinks they have theirs planned out, but just as Gatsby’s death was unexpected, so will human societies disappearance of hope be sudden.

“While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts of emotion. But in the new silence, I felt that silence fall with the house, too.” When Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first time in five years, the weather is wet and raining, it’s cold and misty, making the atmosphere of the situation Gatsby and Daisy are in almost miserable, but when they talk and get used to each other again the rain stops as if the tension has disappeared. After they had gone over to Gatsby’s house the sun is out and the tension had left the atmosphere, but then Daisy melts down when she sees the many colourful shirts Gatsby has and the time comes crashing down between them again and the rain starts pouring. What this represents is the unavailability of the American dream, the time progressed always comes back to you in a way of incompletion. The American dream was something created and spread as something to be completed, but time is a major factor getting in the way, waiting is what the people of the Valley of Ashes have fallen into, waiting for the right opportunity, and with waiting they missed the chances or just couldn’t see them because they were looking for something specific or never offered the prospect to advance their dream into the standard of the American dream. Human society falls to the obscurity of time, we overlook the importance of time, and the consequence of that is, we never see it coming and it is something we can no longer run from. Time came to claim Gatsby and it came to claim the people who followed and believed in the American Dream and its impossibility.

“The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water. It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.” When Gatsby is shot and killed and left in the pool by Wilson, Fitzgerald uses the water as a representative of the American dream, many people ‘die’ when they get too close to their dream, as Gatsby got close to having Daisy but fell short as she made her decision to leave with Tom and abandon Gatsby to his fate. Water acts as the symbol of lost hope through the novel in certain scenes and moments that include mainly Gatsby and Daisy. Gatsby realizing for the first time in a long time that he cannot have Daisy because of how different they have become over the years they have not seen each other. Time was the cause of the fall of Gatsby’s American Dream, in this, humanity thinks it can have all the time in the world, but in reality, the phrase ‘all the time in the world’, does not work. Gatsby represents the people who follow the American dream and its ideals, he got too close to obtaining his dream and as he reached out to grasp it, the dream wasn’t there, the fatal assumption that illusions are solid and attainable.