is full of money,” Nick stumbles across a revelation, which changes his view of society: “That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money- that was the inexhaustible charm rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…” (Fitzgerald) At this point, all of Daisy’s charm and beauty is stripped away, leaving nothing but money to be admired underneath. The dream Gatsby has been so inexorably pursuing is ripped apart into dollar bills as he discovers that for years he has been pursuing not love, but cold, hard, money, hidden behind the disguise of a human face. Subsequently, when Gatsby dies, any chance the American Dream has of surviving in the dehumanized modern world dies with him. Nick later speculates on Gatsby’s last thought before death, conjecturing, “ 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 strengthening and uplifted Gatsby are shattered as he lies in the pool, dazed and confused in a world which he no longer understands. After shooting Gatsby, George Wilson, Fitzgerald’s symbolization of the common man struggling to achieve his own success within the realm of the modern dream, commits suicide. The deaths of a rich man and a poor man, both pushing themselves towards the same impossible goal, mirror the death of the original dream on which America was founded. “At the end of the novel, Nick returns to the Midwest with this disconcerting knowledge, reflecting on Gatsby’s life as the struggle of the American people in a society losing its humanity:” (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, pg 689). “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald, pg.149). The dream is now utterly ...
