Immigration, Glorification, and Forgetting in The Great Gatsby

Abstract

The famous passages of fiction tend to become more rather than less opaque the closer you look at them. So, too, for the glorious closing lines of The Great Gatsby. These lines open things up in a startling way, changing the novel‘s tone from specificity to a general moralizing, and, as Clara points out, from an often negative understanding of Gatsby‘s past to a weirdly abstract hagiography. In these lines Fitzgerald undertakes a very quick modulation that sounds plausible but that, like a magic trick, conceals more than it reveals. Clara‘s essay gets at those things that the ending conceals, its contradictions. As Clara shows, in isolation the passage is compelling, magisterial; in the context of what has gone on before it is highly problematic. And, a lot more interesting. —Dr. Leonard Diepeveen