Your tragedy was that you equated your dream with money, and money with happiness and love. Jay Gatsby, you barged head-on to achieve and conquer your American dream, not stopping until your dreams became your reality, until you reinvented yourself with the dizzying strength of your belief. I blame it on my residual teenage hormones. ¹ I hang my head in shame at my ability to still belt out an enthusiastic (albeit poorly rendered) version of '.Baby One More Time' when it comes on the radio (provided, of course, that my car windows are safely up).
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”Dear Gatsby, not everything I liked back when I was fourteen has withstood the test of time¹ - but you clearly did, and as I get older, closer to your and Nick Carraway's age, your story gathers more dimensions and more tragedy, fleshing out so much more from what I thought of as a tragic love story when I was a child - turning into a great American tragedy. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. Except even the power of most courageous dreamers can be quite helpless to allow us escape the world, our past, and ourselves, giving rise to one of the most famous closing lines of a novel. Just like the Great Houdini - the association the title of this book so easily invokes - you specialized in illusions and escape. Jay Gatsby, who dreamed a dream with the passion and courage few possess - and the tragedy was that it was a wrong dream colliding with reality that was even more wrong - and deadly.
Oh Gatsby, you old sport, you poor semi-delusionally hopeful dreamer with “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”, focusing your whole self and soul on that elusive money-colored green light - a dream that shatters just when you are *this* close to it.
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