How Does Fitzgerald Use Water In The Great Gatsby

A famous idiom in the English language is that time and tide wait for no man. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s realistic fiction novel The Great Gatsby, a man known as Jay Gatsby is in love with a married woman named Daisy. Before her marriage to a man named Tom, Gatsby tries to marry her, but is unable to do so owing to a lack of wealth, as well as due to having to travel overseas with the military. When Daisy is unhappy with her marriage five years in, Gatsby tries to seize the opportunity to resume his relationship with her, hoping to impress her with his riches. While she is indeed impressed, Gatsby is ultimately unable to marry her and fulfil his wish, and the story revolves around this unsuccessful attempt on his part. Through the motif of water, Fitzgerald teaches that distance and time tend to be shorter than they appear.

For instance, he writes in the beginning, “across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered in the water” (Fitzgerald 6). The phrasing here is used to imply that the houses, though not far, still appeared to be a considerable amount into the distance. In addition, “her mother had found her [Daisy] packing her bag one night and saying good-by to a soldier who was going overseas… In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago” (Fitzgerald 79). Daisy’s reason for heading to the dock despite her family’s objections was to see off Gatsby. However, Gatsby was travelling to the other side of the ocean, and since Daisy thought that this was a very long distance and Gatsby would perhaps never return, she ended up marrying a different man. This frequent perception of distances as extremely large also applies to time, where the future often seems to be very distant. Fitzgerald thus uses water to signify how long distances sometimes appear to some