The Final Words

When I read the last lines of this book, I imagined both Nick Carraway and F. Scott Fitzgerald saying them. In my mind they are mostly the same person. As I read those lines I added myself to the “us,” “we,” and “our” group that Fitzgerald was describing – as I think most of the readers of this book do. I believe the author is collectively talking about the human race and how each of us longs for something in our past that we try to bring into our present lives. Those that are persistent dreamers like Gatsby tend to think like him (“Can’t repeat the past? . . .Why of course you can!”), and they have unrealistic dreams that, like in The Great Gatsby, can end tragically and not at all how the dreamer intended. I think Fitzgerald is trying to tell his readers that the past can’t and shouldn’t be repeated. He has observed how some humans spend their lives trying to guide their boats “back ceaselessly into the past” and seen the bad things that come because of it. Writers write what they know and want to get that knowledge out there and make people more aware and I think that’s what Fitzgerald is doing.

We can still have dreams, but ones that inspire us to move forward. The great minds and inventors of history didn’t accomplish the things they accomplished because they were hung up on their past and determined to move backward. As in the words of Disney’s Meet the Robinsons, we must “keep moving forward.”