The Great Gatsby

The green light at the end of Daisy's dock works because it stays just out of reach on purpose — Gatsby spends the whole book converting a woman into a symbol of a future he can chase forever but never quite catch, which is the closest Fitzgerald comes to a thesis statement. The valley of ashes, the literal industrial waste dumped between West Egg's new money and Manhattan's old, sits under Doctor T. J. Eckleburg's fading, godless billboard eyes — the closest thing this book has to a moral witness, and it isn't one, just an advertisement nobody bothered to take down. Old money and new never actually merge: Gatsby can fill his closet with shirts from an English tailor and throw parties that fill his lawn with strangers, but he can't buy the one thing Daisy's voice is 'full of' — money that's always already been there.

Nick Carraway insists early on that he's 'inclined to reserve all judgments,' then spends the rest of the novel judging everyone he meets, which is the book's quiet joke on its own narrator. He's writing roughly two years after the fact, back in the Midwest, and that distance lets him shape Gatsby into a tragic hero he's not sure Gatsby actually was — Nick's closing eulogy says more about his own need for someone to believe in than about Gatsby's actual character.

Nick calls himself 'the only honest person I have ever known' in the same breath as lying to Jordan Baker and quietly enabling Gatsby's affair with his own married cousin. His snobbery leaks out constantly — he's proud of his Yale pedigree, faintly disgusted by the 'appalling' guests at Gatsby's own parties — even as he claims immunity from the moral rot around him. The novel's genius is letting you feel the gap between what Nick asserts about himself and what he actually does.