Gatsby Green Light

“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—” The Green Light in The Great Gatsby situates at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg lawn. The author Fitzgerald compares the green light to how America, rising out of the ocean, must have looked to early settlers of the new nation. The green light represents Gatsby’s incorruptible dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy; he reaches toward it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal. Gatsby’s longing for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream,

Gatsby with the disappointment of dream, the symbolic meaning behind the green light collapses. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us…So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”(Fitzgerald 193). Now the light has totally ceased being an observable object with no more meaning and illusion. Nick is not in Long Island any more, Gatsby is dead, Daisy is gone for wealth and luxury life with her husband Tom. The only way the green light exists is in Nick’s memories and philosophical observations. This means that the light is now just a symbol of the vanish of American Dream and nothing else. Fitzgerald quoted from Youth and show how well Fitzgerald had mastered Conrad’s art of magic suggestiveness “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”(Fitzgerald). During the novel, Gatsby’s dream is revealed to be the delusional conviction that he could ignore five years of events and Daisy’s own personality and inner life to get what he wants. With this disappointment, the symbolic meaning behind the green light collapses. The love Gatsby feels for Daisy is unethical and the green light loses its enchanted qualities and instead it

In the almost end of the story, “See the accident?” asked the policeman. “No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster’n forty. Going y, sixty.”(Fitzgerald 148).The car is this never stopping, this excessive mobility, that pulls Myrtle, George even Gatsby so far away from their dreaming life. Myrtle and George want to move away from this crowded place, Gatsby wants to live with Daisy. However, all those dreams would never come true. The car which reflects the reality bring them to the tragedy. The green light is also the symbol the ending of Myrtle’s life. The green light represents its meaning when Myrtle didn’t wait for the treen traffic light, she crossed the road and got the accident. Sarah Churchwell, in her recent book Careless People, quotes from New Yorkers’ complaints in newspaper letters to the editor in 1922 and 1924 about the confusing new traffic signals “green in this city when displayed on a tower means stop”; “our signal system provides . . . a green signal really for stop” (Churchwell 66). The green traffic light, seem as Gatsby’s green light, is the symbol of Myrtle’s dream of luxury life. The seemingly normal things gather together connected the whole story that made this tragedy. The green light gives people hopes but then destroys their lives. Myrtle ignores the green light in order to catch her dream so she