The Great Gatsby: Boats Against the Current

After Gatsby died I found myself on his side, and alone; I tried to gather people for his funeral, but no one would come.Daisy and Tom had gone away that same afternoon without leaving an address, and Wolfshiem wrote that he could not get mixed up in the affair.Even Klipspringer, who had lived in Gatsby’s house for months, telephoned only to ask for a pair of tennis shoes he had left behind.

Then, on the third day, a sad old man arrived from Minnesota: Henry C. Gatz, Gatsby’s father.He was proud of his son, and showed me an old book in which the young Jimmy had written a daily schedule for improving himself.“Rise from bed, 6:00 a.m. … Study electricity … Read one improving book every week,” it said, and I felt all of Gatsby’s hope in those few lines.

On the day of the funeral it rained, and only Gatsby’s father, a minister, a few servants and I followed him to the grave.At the last moment the man with owl-eyed glasses came through the wet grass; of all those party guests, he was the only one who came.“Why, my God! They used to go there by the hundreds,” he said sadly.

That autumn I decided to go back home to the Middle West, because the East had become haunted for me.I saw Tom once more in New York, and I understood that he and Daisy were careless people: they smashed up things and people, and then went back into their money.On my last night I walked down to Gatsby’s beach, looked across the dark water, and thought of his wonder when he first saw the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.He did not know that it was already behind him; but Gatsby believed in the green light, the future that every year moves further away from us.So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.