The Great Gatsby Wiki / Significance and Presence of Time (2023)

How does time add depth to "The Great Gatsby"?

By Laura Bruno, Ary Park and Emily Gallagher

Time played a big part in the novel because so much of the novel revolves around the changes Gatsby goes through. Characters mature and transform throughout the novel and play key roles in the plot. As characters mature, relationships change. Gatsby and Daisy's relationship is based on the past and time has prevented them from being together as it has torn them apart. Some important symbols include the clock and the seasons.

***Parts in italics are main ideas.

Chapter 5 Passage

Ciara Rafferty

“'Sorry about the watch,' he said. My own face had now taken on a deep tropical burn. I couldn't muster a single commonplace out of the thousands in my head.

'It's an old watch,' I told them foolishly. I think we all thought for a moment that he had been smashed to pieces on the floor.

"We haven't seen each other for many years," Daisy said, her voice as natural as ever.

'Five years next November'. The automatic quality of Gatsby's response delayed us by at least another minute” (92).

I chose this passage because the abstract idea of ​​time in history is very stimulating. Gatsby's life up to that point had been consumed by Daisy. Her time was spent thinking about her, and this idea is reflected in the lack of time in the book.The time of day or the day of the week or even the month is rarely mentioned due to its insignificance. Seasons are the only concrete use of time. The summer season seems to represent Gatsby's dreams of Daisy. Summer is when he first met her and that's when he meets her again.

Another analysis of time is presented by the way the clock falls. Although the watch does not break, it is as if it has.Time stopped completely with the rebirth of Daisy and Gatsby. Time is no longer essentialNow time is gone, and even Nick can feel it. As time has passed, it is as if the measures of time no longer exist and there seems to be confusion floating around the room. Fitzgerald uses the word "year" and contrasts it with the word "minute". The difference between a year and a minute is no longer known because both times seem to represent long periods of time. Gatsby had been waiting for this moment for so long that when it arrived, time no longer made sense.

As time has no meaning, we can only believe that everything will go back to the way it was before. According to this theory, given time, Daisy and Gatsby will go back to being young people having fun.🇧🇷 But with a deeper reading of the novel, it becomes clear that time gains importance. During their time apart, Daisy learned about peer pressure and the difference between East and West Egg. While she seems to want to break that barrier to be with Gatsby, her time spent living in East Egg makes that extremely unlikely..

Chapter 6 Passage

Jacob Lazaro

“Out of the corner of his eye, Gatsby saw that the blocks of pavement actually formed a stairway and ascended to a secret place above the trees; he could go up there if he went up there alone, and once there he could suck the porridge. of life, swallow the incomparable milk of wonder” (117).

…The hindsight that the conclusion of this book offers is proof of the disaster of change.Time transforms Gatsby and Daisy, and five years later, the scene is far less romantic, optimistic and poetic. Society does away with Jay Gatsby, initially figuratively, but later physically. Gatsby is haunted by economic stigmas and his dark past, his former name...

Chapter 7 Passages

laura bruno

“I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous and threatening path of a new decade. It was seven o'clock when we got into the coupe with him and left for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exultant and laughing, but his voice was as far removed from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult on the high roof. Human sympathy has its limits, and we are content to let all your tragic arguments fade away with the city lights behind them. Thirty: the promise of a decade of loneliness, a dwindling list of single men to meet, a dwindling portfolio of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too smart to carry long-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we crossed the dark bridge, his pale face fell lazily onto the shoulder of my coat, and the formidable arm of thirty was extinguished by the reassuring pressure of his hand. So we headed towards death through the refreshing twilight” (Fitzgerald 143).

There is a slight hint of irony throughout the book that, of all the characters, Nick is the only truly stable one; the ironic part is he's the only one who isn't rich. Daisy is completely unstable and, as we discussed in class, fickle in choosing who she loves. Tom “always wandered around looking with a little nostalgia at the dramatic turmoil of some unrecoverable football game” (10) and had an aggressive “cruel body” (11). Gatsby tries to keep a love he had 5 years ago and is obsessed with everything going well because he now has money. Lastly, although Jordan is the most normal compared to the others, she still has an air of superiority about her. Nick, however, is not falling for the disillusionment of the times. She could have gone to a party at Gatsby's house or fallen in love with Jordan Baker and not been able to break out of love. He could have seen the world using the judgment, but for the most part he didn't (with the exception of when he spoke of Gatsby when congratulating him, 162). In this passage, Nick recognizes what life will be like from now on—hAt thirty, things change, especially your life. He's not going to sugar coat it, he's not going to leave and move to live in the past, he's going to be Nick.

In my opinion, he is the only money character (as Ben would say) becausehe views life through a lens of acceptance. In the above passage he acknowledges that there will be a difficult road ahead. It's going to be scary, but I hope this "decade of loneliness" isn't so lonely if you have Jordan by your side. It's interesting because he compares her to Daisy, saying that she is "too wise to carry long-forgotten dreams from age to age". The idea of ​​having a woman with him grows cold, while "an increasingly reduced list of single men to meet, a suitcase increasingly reduced in enthusiasm, [and] increasingly scarce hair" becomes part of your life. At the beginning of the paragraph he talks about how scary this road is that we have ahead of us, the thirties. And in the end he convinced himself that although it leads to death, it won't be so bad...

…A part of this passage that reflects the true distance between Tom and Nick's lives is when Nick talks about how “Tom's voice was as far from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk…” It's as if Nick and Jordan no They don't want to hear this nonsense, they are tired of being run over by a man who is arrogant, disillusioned and living in the past. In this case, Nick decides that all that drama is something he doesn't need or want to hear. He wants to keep living in his thirties, trying to enjoy what he has, not trying to be a rich man, not trying to fall in love again; trying to be Nick.

Emily Choi

"Oh, you want too much!" he cried to Gatsby. 'I love you now, isn't that enough? I can't help what happened. He started crying helplessly. I loved him once, but I loved you too.

Gatsby's eyes opened and closed. 'Do you love me too?' he repeated” (143).

This was the moment I realized that Gatsby and Daisy could never be together.Five years, however short or long they seem, was enough to tear them apart. It is clear from Gatsby's disbelief that Daisy is not the person he thought she was. Gatsby's pain is tangible. For years and years, she had dreamed of nothing but this moment, this moment that was supposed to be perfect. He had constructed in his mind a scene very similar to this one in which Daisy vehemently proclaimed the enduring nature of her love for Gatsby. She would mock Tom and tell him, mercilessly, that she had never loved him, that all these years Gatsby had been her only person. Her total devotion was answered by an "I loved you too". To discover that Daisy's feelings were not as strong as his, Gatsby must have felt rejected and betrayed. Gatsby loved Daisy, only Daisy, for five years..

Having finished The Great Gatsby, I see that my prediction was correct. If Gatsby hadn't been killed, if he'd only been injured, things wouldn't be any different. His own love would never be extinguished, which unfortunately would bring nothing but misery and a broken heart. Just as Tom had another woman in New York that he had never left Daisy for, Daisy would never leave Tom. Daisy is no longer the sweet, innocent girl Gatsby knew so long ago; now she is a selfish woman with a "voice full of money" and there is nothing Gatsby can do about it.

Chapter 9 Passages

Emily Gallagher

"Gatsby believed in the green light, in the orgasmic future that year after year recedes before us. He eluded us then, but that doesn't matter: tomorrow we'll run faster, stretch our arms farther... And one fine morning— So we go we, ships against the current, endlessly dragged into the past” (189).

…The green light is also Daisy. He was always looking up to her to be with her and feel the love she once had for him.She looked forward to the future they would have together, but based her ideas on the past. How is this possible? In the end, Gatsby was never given the green light and never got to live out the future he hoped for. Everything he did was for Daisy, all the money, the house and the party was all for her, but in the end it wasn't meant to be. Nick tells the reader that no matter what happens, we will always look to the future and try harder every day to achieve what we want, but in the end, like Gatsby, we can never achieve that goal if it is rooted in the past. 🇧🇷

Ricardo Kim

The relationship between his father and Gatsby is an odd one, as we assume from the short snippet that reveals his false identity and is also shown at Gatz's burial of "Jimmy" in the East, where he "always liked him best".It shows that Gatsby, when he was 17 years old, cut all ties with his poor family to pursue his dream.…

Gatz shows Nick a timeline that Gatsby kept when he was young, which showshis ambitious devotion to self-improvement. It was on a sheet of paper from the book "Hopalong Cassidy". I did some research and “Hopalong Cassidy” is a western adventure that shows where Gatsby's dreamy spirit came from.

billy lee

“Gatsby believed in the green light, in the orgasmic future that year after year recedes before us. So he escaped us, but it doesn't matter: tomorrow we will run faster, we will stretch our arms further ... And a good day ...

This is how we sail, boats against the current, endlessly dragged into the past” (189).

Fitzgerald ends his book with a beautiful, magnificent paragraph that gives hope to his readers, or at least to me. As Richard said, Gatsby can represent the American dream. And Fitzgerald believed that the American Dream always faced challenges like "ships against the current". But as Gatsby did with his dream of being with Daisy,he believed in the future and that we should all “run faster, stretch our arms farther… And one good day –” our dreams will come true. The green light signals our future with our dreams.

However, I don't think this image fits well with Gatsby. Throughout the book, I always had the feeling thatGatsby wanted to turn the clock back, not forward it.. o I've always wanted to go back to the time when he and Daisy were lovers. without Tom in the way. I don't recall ever seeing footage of Gatsby looking into the future.

Or maybe the future he looked forward to was his past (which makes my head spin). And I don't understand the ending.Are you saying that no matter what we try, we will be "taken back in time"? There are many ways to interpret the end of the Great Gatsby. It seems to be interpreted the way the reader wants it to be interpreted. It seems to be full of hope and despair. The entire passage is a paradox. It seems to say look ahead and run towards your goal, but it will be a losing battle (or maybe I'm just misunderstanding everything). The "incessantly going back in time" is what confuses me the most. A little help? Are you referring only to Gatsby or society in general?

laura bruno

“And as I sat there thinking about the ancient and unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's astonishment when he first saw the green light at the end of Daisy's Pier. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly miss it. He didn't know that he was already behind him, somewhere in that vast darkness beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgasmic future that year after year recedes before us. Then he eluded us, but it doesn't matter: tomorrow we'll run faster, we'll stretch our arms further. 🇧🇷 🇧🇷 🇧🇷 And a good day--

This is how we sail, boats against the current, endlessly dragged into the past” (189).

At the beginning, Nick is talking about this past that Gatsby chose to relive by "removing the green light at the end of Daisy's Pier". Gatsby had this romantic idea, as we all know, to bring Daisy back and find perfection in his life with a wonderful wife (and wonderful bank account).The green light, in this case, is the past, a world of yore. Although we've discussed why Gatsby wants Daisy back so badly, he still wants her for himself. I find it interesting that this "green light" is at the end of Daisy's pier (I know the lights were at the end of the piers) because it seems Gatsby was looking for something completely out of the way of their current lives. It's as if the green light is practically in the water, getting further away from each of them as the seconds tick by, as more wood is added to the shore side of the pier. The past, or rather the green light, is long gone.

Nick also talks about how Gatsby has turned his life around and has "come such a long way" that he can't believe that after all his hard work he won't get Daisy. He did everything to be closer to Daisy and have another moment like the one described earlier in the book (when Jordan remembers seeing him looking Daisy in the eye, 79).But he is so disappointed; you are living in the past when times are changing around you. As Nick puts it, "he didn't know it was already behind him, somewhere in that vast darkness beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic lay under night." He is so absorbed in his ideas of getting Daisy and the past that he doesn't realize that the future has already arrived and that he can never get anything like the past.

In the penultimate paragraph I get more confused because it contradicts my interpretations of the previous paragraph. Nick is talking about how Gatsby believes in the green light towards the future and what it has to bring.Perhaps Gatsby believed in the future he wanted to believe in, a future different from how it all turned out. But this is just speculation. Maybe the green light in general should be time, past, present and future. I really do not know.

However, the idea of ​​time and its changes are recurrent throughout the book. Especially when it comes to Gatsby and his "dream",there is an idea that the past is never the same as the present and never goes back to the way it was. The future is a mystery that Nick will face, but somehow Fitzgerald makes it seem like everything will be alright and everything will work out. in the end (although it appears that was not the case for Gatsby). My question is, what do you mean when you say, "And a fine morning🇧🇷 Are you referring to the morning when people are going to die? Are you talking about when everyone really grows up and learns that chasing past dreams is not the way to live a successful future? I'm not sure, but I think that's exactly how Nick feels, insecure but willing to move on.

Eunice Package

“'Oh, and do you remember,' he added, 'a conversation we once had about driving a car?'

"Well, not exactly."

"Did you say a bad driver is only safe until he finds another bad driver?" Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean, it was reckless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were a more honest and straightforward person. I thought it was his secret pride.

"I'm thirty years old," I told him. ‘I have five years to lie to myself and call it honor’” (185-186).

…Judging from the bad drivers in the book, from Jordan to Daisy to possibly even Tom, it's clear that the term is a mean label for people who don't consider the effects their actions have on those around them. Jordan remembers Nick once saying that "a bad driver was only safe until he met another bad driver", meaning that only until the bad driver was harmed due to another's reckless driving would he realize the impact of his own actions on other people. 🇧🇷

Jordan considers himself a victim of Nick's "reckless driving", and while he was taken aback at first, I found it difficult to imagine Nick as anything other than unconcerned about other people's feelings, as he placed such a premium on non-judgment. of others at the beginning of the book; what was more surprising was that Nick doesn't deny it. Does that mean he accepts himself like everyone else, a thoughtless person acting for his own personal gain? If so, perhaps this passage spells the end of Nick's "secret pride" in non-judgment; perhaps he acknowledges that he was never there in the first place, saying he was "too old to lie to himself and call it honor".

What is Fitzgerald trying to suggest here?What is inevitable that a person is critical? Nick seems to think so, as his distant tone changes to a critical one on the next page; he labels Tom and Daisy "sloppy people", showing that he has given up trying to appear impartial.

What causes this sudden change of heart? According to what Nick told Jordan, this was part of her growth throughout the novel. Fitzgerald writes that Nick has "five years too long" to consider himself unprejudiced, perhaps telling readers that only the naive think otherwise.

However, despite the fact that being critical is generally considered a negative quality, Fitzgerald seems to have a different approach to the concept. Once Nick notices Tom and Daisy's carelessness, he looks dismissive, but his words also ring true, which means thattrying to reserve judgment for a negative situation is the same as denying its immorality, and seeing yourself as nonjudgmental is the same as denying your own shortcomings.🇧🇷 This way, Nick has been like everyone else since the beginning of the book. The same as Daisy pretended to be content with her life by blurting out details that distracted her, and just as Gatsby pretended to be born into wealth, Nick pretended to be a person of great forbearance, even displaying "his way of tolerance" (6) in everything. beginning of the book

Roni Finkelstein:

Step:

"But he knew he was at Daisy's house because of a colossal accident. As glorious as his future as Jay Gatsby might be, he was currently a penniless young man, without a past, and at any moment the invisibility cloak of his uniform could fall off. of that." his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could, ravenous and unscrupulous, he finally took Daisy on a quiet October night, he took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

He could have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under false pretenses. I don't mean to say that he bargained with his phantom millions, but he deliberately gave Daisy a sense of security; he made her believe that he was a person of the same social status as her, who was fully capable of taking care of her. Indeed, he had no such facilities, no comfortable family behind him, and he was exposed to the whims of an impersonal government to be blown up anywhere in the world."

Answer/Analysis:

This passage highlights Gatsby's dependence on Daisy. Nick realizes how fragile Gatsby is. The passage creates a weak image of Gatsby because he "didn't have a comfortable family behind him". The fact that Gatsby literally depends on one person makes him subject to any whim. That's a stark contrast to Daisy, who is grounded in so many ways. She has a husband, son and a wealthy family to impress. The solitary nature of Gatsby's life makes him prone to submit to his own fantasies and “[take] what he gets, voraciously and unscrupulously” ().

Time with Daisy isn't the only thing Gatsby voraciously scraped together when he arrived. He also raised money that way, through illegal and sometimes immoral means. So desperate to create an image for Daisy, Gatsby goes to great lengths to earn her "ghost millions". The term Fitzgerald uses to describe Gatsby's acquired wealth fits oddly with how he acquired it. Throughout the novel, there is a sense of mystery surrounding how Gatsby made his millions and acquired his home. Thus, the frightening nature of the word "ghost" makes it an apt description for Gatsby's wealth.

"Ghost" is also an apt description for the character of Gatsby. The fact that he is not bound by anything other than his love for Daisy makes him a ghost. His former life of poverty died and in its place rose a rich ghost. This faint image of a ghost against Tom's stocky frame highlights the contrast between the two men.

The dead are said to return as ghosts to take care of unfinished business. Getting Daisy is Gatsby's unfinished business and when he fails to get her for himself and realizes that she will never be his like before, he dies.