The Great Gatsby!

1. Describe and analyze the significance of the last line of The Great Gatsby.

The last line of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." In my own words, I interpret this to mean that no matter what, we move forward in life and time, always having obstacles like the currents to push us back, but sometimes when things are hard we never fail to fall carelessly back to a place we had once been most comfortable. In another sense, we live and overcome obstacles, but in the end we inevitably return to the earth in whence we came. There is a certain everyone walks in, and many characters in the novel walk these different kinds of circles, pushing forward and bearing the past, starting over and over again.

The narrator, Nick Carraway, moved to New York in the beginning of the book. He had been bored with his life in the west after the war, so he challenged himself to find something more exciting. He found probably more than he bargained for when he moved to the West Egg of Long Island and met Jay Gatsby. He never expected to meet another man of the west, whose loyalty and ambition would perplex him. Jay Gatsby, whose real name is James Gatz as revealed in the beginning of chapter six, has a mysterious past and fortune that Nick would discover after many "lies" and not-quite truths, which are yet more obstacles in their friendship. At first, the suspicious and untrustworthy new-money aristocrat was just being judged, and by the end, Nick called himself Gatsby's close friend and was one of few to attend his funeral after trying so hard to get someone else to come too. After that, he returned home to Minnesota.

Nick's cousin and her husband, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, run in a different kind of loop. Their materialism leads them to move from the western city of Chicago to the elegant East Egg, where Daisy is eventually reunited with her past love, Jay Gatsby. Previously, in her present, she is married to Tom, but she ignores that small detail and has an affair with Gatsby anyway. In the end, she returns to her bliss of ignorance and materialistic life with Tom and leaves Gatsby to fall. Tom, on the other hand, married Daisy and cheated on her, but in the end, also returned to the same thing. In the last scene where Tom is seen in chapter nine, the materialism shows when he enters a jewelry store. Nick also describes the Buchanans as careless, because afterward they almost completely forget about the whole affair with Gatsby, though they may just be putting it in the back of their minds and ignoring it, moving on. Though Tom still seems a bit pained by the loss of his mistress, for the last thing he says in the novel is, "And if you think I didn't have my share of suffering--look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful...." He is similar to Gatsby in the way that his heart is stuck in the past... and that kept his mind returning to the thought of loving Myrtle relentlessly, despite the fact that he stayed married to Daisy.

Gatsby, on the other hand, went through both a normal cycle of life and death, though a short-lived one, as well as a ring of time. This young man was on the threshold of life, rich with parties that hollow people came to and young with dreams that were so close yet so far away. He lived to the fullest and more, and in the end, having nothing left to do but die after losing the one thing he had ever wanted so dearly in his life, he died. However, his life, his mind, and his heart were trapped in a small eternity, longing to recapture the moment that a young Daisy had captured his heart. His wish drove everything he did, which created a wealthy and materialistic future for him, but after Daisy's careless ignorance and rejection, his dream crumbled some time before his body did. And at his funeral, he returned not only to the earth and heavens, he returned to being James Gatz. His father Henry Gatz gave life to him, and after he abandoned his name to be surrounded by hundreds of people he didn't even know, his father still came to his death.

So, as life goes on, so does the past in the minds of man. These four characters reached their end. It was the end of their wonder, their feelings, their memories, their lives... and ironically, with the end of the great Gatsby, their circle.