The Green Light

Last night I was talking to someone about The Great Gatsby and I mentioned that I had named my blog “The Green Light.” (see Welcome message at right for the relevant quote.)He then asked me a very important question that I admit had not crossed my mind—a question that leads to some very big life evaluations. I hadn’t really thought about this question because the answer has been so obvious that I never bothered to really express the answer, even to myself. “Kristina,” he said, “what is your green light?”
I’m sure you will all remember from high school English class that the “green light” is the major symbol in The Great Gatsby. Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby’s beloved, has a green light at the end of her dock on Long Island Sound. Gatsby stares at that green light and even stretches his arm out toward it. Everyone from high school students to college professors have speculated on the symbolism of the green light: Daisy herself, money and material wealth, the American Dream, Gatsby’s vision of himself. Much ink has been spilled in the battle to pin down the green light. Fitzgerald even admits that the green light is a symbol: “Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever…It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” Every reader brings with him or herself a different green light. So what is mine?
I firmly believe that The Great Gatsby IS the Great American Novel and simply one of the best things ever written by anybody. But I think I have a different reason for my attachment to this novel than many people. I do absolutely love the language. The novel has passages that really do bring me to tears with their achingly poetic beauty. I’ve described the style of The Great Gatsby as similar to the trademark style of the age from which the novel came: Jazz. Furthermore, The Great Gatsby offers so much juicy, rich material for discussion. You can read the book so many different ways and pull so many different issues out of it. I must have read it at least five times, yet it still amazes me.
But I have a more personal reason for loving The Great Gatsby. I love Gatsby himself. I identify so strongly with Gatsby and see so much of myself in him. And I just love what he represents: “There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life…It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness.” When I read and discuss this book in a class setting, the reactions of other students always shock me. So many people find Gatsby himself silly, stupid, and as narrator Nick admits, appallingly sentimental. I just cannot see that. To me, Gatsby is a hero because he believes in hope, romance, beauty, dreams, and above all, love. He believes that if he just loves Daisy enough, the world will all work out. I have been guilty of that belief myself.
I’ll just go ahead and admit it now—one of my green lights is, just like in Gatsby, a specific person. I read the passages in which Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first time in five years with personal experience of exactly the same event. I have had moments of being “consumed with wonder at [his] presence.” But unlike Daisy, my green light has never “tumbled short of [my] dreams.” In fact, Gatsby has been somewhat of a self-help book for me in that it has warned me not to do with my green light what Gatsby did with Daisy. I know that I cannot “commit [myself] to the following of a grail.” Gatsby “paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” And I know that I cannot do that. But I read Gatsby with personal experience of feeling about someone the same way that Gatsby feels about Daisy.
On a bigger level, then, my green light is love and hope. My green light represents a vision of the world that has a place for such Romantic people as Jay Gatsby. I do believe that if we dream enough, love enough, and hope enough, we can make an “orgastic future” of any kind we want. The 1920s were a deeply cynical time, but Gatsby’s gift for hope and romantic readiness shines through that time. Gatsby is an icon of the 1920s, but he actually does not fit in with the feelings of that time. I think we are living in a pretty cynical time right now, but I try to keep the romantic readiness alive, partially by believing in characters like Jay Gatsby. Maybe you will think me appallingly sentimental. But I recall the title I once gave to a paper I wrote on Gatsby’s dreaming ways: “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” I hope that someday, you’ll join us.