It’s 8 p.m. on a Thursday, and that enormous paper, the one you’ve been putting off all week, is due tomorrow. You sit down at your desk and hunch over your computer with every intention of completing it before midnight. Somehow, though, your cursor wanders over to that Safari icon. One click, and Facebook instantly offers you endless stalking possibilities. Thank you, Internet.
No notifications? Ouch. You brush off the no-one-likes-you-loser blues and spend the next hour and 37 minutes searching people from your classes, your res hall, that one laundry room run-in. When you’re done, you still have two hours and 23 minutes for the paper, which is _ages_, right? Then you start in on the high school photos and nostalgia overwhelms you. _Look how cute we were at prom! Oh my gosh that dress… What an amazing night._
This is a common sentiment since we tend to idealize past events. Like it or not, our past molds us into the people we become. The people we knew, the places we visited, the experiences we had never leave us, and we hopelessly long to live them once again. Even as we strive bravely into the future, we are beaten back into the past.
Jay Gatsby embodies this unfortunate truth. The protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby” obsesses over the past. He constructs his is entire present and future solely to win back the lover that escaped him.
Gatsby’s enormous Long Island mansion, his extravagant parties, his odd manner of speech and his flamboyant outfits are all pieces of an intricate plan to recapture Daisy Buchanan, a now-married woman.
With the parties in particular, he hopes to draw her to him like a moth to a brilliant light. She never shows, though, and more often than not, Gatsby spends the evening avoiding his guests, casting surreptitious glances across the bay at the much fainter green light on the end of her dock. He knows she’s there, but he must wait for her to come on her own.
Obsessed with regaining Daisy’s love, enraptured by the intoxicating perfection of his past months with her, Gatsby wants her back at any cost… literally. He figures since Daisy married a high-society man, all he needs to resuscitate the past is money. He amasses a small fortune (through bootlegging, one of the only ways to amass a small fortune when your family is as poor and insignificant as Gatsby’s) and with it attempts to give Daisy what he thinks she wants: status.
The pair does begin a daring affair under the nose of Daisy’s belligerent husband Tom Buchanan, but things eventually crumble. Tom does his part to break things off, but the most insurmountable obstacle is Daisy herself.
Daisy lives her share of life in the past but she, unlike Gatsby, has changed. The Daisy who Gatsby loved no longer exists — time and Tom have beaten her down into a flimsy, fair-weather woman. Daisy is trapped in her present life and incapable of returning to Gatsby.
Gatsby will never get his Daisy back. She is too changed to relive his fantasy with him. He cannot escape the past, nor can he progress into the future. His future is meaningless once it becomes clear Daisy is a no-go. Hard as Gatsby tries to make it to the future, something forbids it.
One of Fitzgerald’s many messages is that it’s human nature to click through those old Facebook albums, but dwell on them irresolutely, and you’ll make decisions that incontrovertibly affect your future. Go ahead and relive high school. Acknowledge that you’re bound to long for the past, but don’t try with all your might to recreate it — don’t let it consume you.
Gatsby’s past has him in a chokehold, but Daisy strives into the future and manages to change with the years. The change may be for the worse, but hey, at least it happens. Progress is better than self-destructive stagnancy and hopeless longing.
After two hours and 16 minutes of growing teary-eyed over prom pics, you finally tug your mind out of the past. _Paper! I need to type that!_ At this point, though, your brain no longer functions on an eloquent level. You scrawl something out, hoping for a C at best. An evening of reminiscing has destroyed your letter grade — the past has swept you away. It happens.
Acknowledge this and stride boldly into the future anyway. Write your paper in the face of failure. The past may reclaim you (because, yeah, maybe prom was awesome) but the struggle and the push against it make the present worth living in.
