Nick: “the party was over”
Nick has been changed by what he has witnessed in the short few months he spent as Gatsby’s neighbour and friend
Nick: ‘After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me’
- he is appalled to have witnessed the treatment of Gatsby by the system that Gatsby himself had had so much faith in.
- Nick also knows that it was his own cousin and her husband who, fuelled by the own selfishness and prejudices and snobbery, had destroyed Gatsby:
‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness’.
- Tom and Daisy represent the behaviour of the upper classes of America’s so-called egalitarian society: they have established fortunes, family identities and power in a network that is designed to exclude people like the faithful, hopeful Gatsby
‘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’.
Gatsby had been seduced by the promise of success as a reward for his total commitment to the American Dream of limitless opportunity, and he had come thrillingly close to achieving it all:
‘He did not know that [his dream] was already behind him’.
What he didn’t realise, though, was the dream had been corrupted already, and the prejudice of the system would destroy him before it would allow him to succeed:
