I was going to ask to see the rubies when the phone rang, and
Nick's observation in the final line is a reflection on how, no matter how much wealth or success we may accumulate, we'll always chase after more in our futile efforts to “have it all.”
Nick recalls a memory that Gatsby once shared with him about the first time Gatsby kissed Daisy. Nick calls Gatsby's sentimentality about history "appalling" and reflects that in that kiss Gatsby's dreams of success focused solely on Daisy. She became an idealized dream for Gatsby and the center of his life.
The Frontier
'I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all', declares Nick Carraway in Chapter 9 (p. 167). On a literal level, he seems to mean that all the main characters are from the Midwest, the geographical heart of America.
Gatsby seeks out Nick after Tom and Daisy leave the party; he is unhappy because Daisy has had such an unpleasant time. Gatsby wants things to be exactly the same as they were before he left Louisville: he wants Daisy to leave Tom so that he can be with her. Nick reminds Gatsby that he cannot re-create the past.
But here's what we think is going on: Nick realizes that chasing a future dream just ends up miring us in the past. All of our dreams are based on visions of our past self, like Gatsby who in the past believed that he would end up with Daisy and who believed in the American myth of the self-made man.
Nick's final thoughts suggest that the future will forever remain inaccessible. Gatsby believed that he could shape the future to fit his dreams. But in the end, he fell short of achieving his vision of a happy future with Daisy. The troubles of his past came back to overpower his ability to change his fate.
What does Nick Carraway symbolize? Nick symbolizes the outsider's perspective of the way things were in the 1920s. He is not as wealthy as the other characters in the novel and thus recognizes how morally corrupt they are.
In the novel, narrator Nick Carraway's last line is, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Time has a funny way of changing not only our language but the way society views people and their actions.
Lesson Summary. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is symbolic of Jay Gatsby's undying love, desperation and the inability to reach the American dream. The story is set in New York during the Jazz Age.
“You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Nick addresses these words to Gatsby the last time he sees his neighbor alive, in Chapter 8. This moment nicely captures Nick's ambivalent feelings about Gatsby.
Eventually, Gatsby won Daisy's heart, and they made love before Gatsby left to fight in the war. Daisy promised to wait for Gatsby, but in 1919 she chose instead to marry Tom Buchanan, a young man from a solid, aristocratic family who could promise her a wealthy lifestyle and who had the support of her parents.
Nick is responsible for the funeral because he is the only decent human being interested in arranging it. When Nick finds out that Gatsby has been killed, he is the only one who goes to see him.
Nick probably loves Gatsby as a friend – someone he can trust, someone he admires, someone he would like to get to know better. However, it's Gatsby who is obsessed with Daisy. So even if Nick was gay (which is unlikely), his infatuation with Gatsby would be one-sided.
The Oxford English Dictionary says the use of the noun “nick” in the sense of a prison, especially one at a police station, is of Australian origin. The first published reference is from The Sydney Slang Dictionary (1882), which defines “the nick” as a “gaol.”
When he first goes to a party at Gatsby's, he seeks Gatsby out (presumably to thank him for his invitation), while the others at the party gossip about Gatsby and enjoy themselves. Similarly, after Gatsby's death, Nick is the only one who shows concern. Nick can therefore be seen as the moral compass of the story.
The Last Line of The Great Gatsby. The last sentence of this novel is consistently ranked in the lists of best last lines that magazines like to put together. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. So what makes this sentence so great?
Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is especially famous for its final line: "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Though Gatsby insisted that Daisy never loved Tom, Daisy admitted that she loved both Tom and Gatsby. The confrontation ended with Daisy leaving with Gatsby in his yellow car, while Tom departed with Nick and Jordan.
He sees both the extraordinary quality of hope that Gatsby possesses and his idealistic dream of loving Daisy in a perfect world. Though Nick recognizes Gatsby's flaws the first time he meets him, he cannot help but admire Gatsby's brilliant smile, his romantic idealization of Daisy, and his yearning for the future.
Print. There are multiple things that Nick symbolized throughout this book as he played the "un-biased" narrator but the best thing that I believe Nick symbolized was a telescope, he symbolizes this because he had perfect perspective, he had the social credentials, and he had a talent of reading people.
Gatsby's dream, personified in the green light, is the primary symbol of the novel and ties into Fitzgerald's overwhelming critique of the American Dream throughout the novel.
A while after the funeral, Nick saw Tom. Tom said that he told Wilson, the man who killed Gatsby, that it was Gatsby's car that hit Wilson's wife, Myrtle. Nick did not like living in the East anymore, and he decided to leave the city and move back west.
Gatsby is also a classical tragic hero in that he is the victim of forces outside himself – Daisy's carelessness and Tom's hard malice. While one might agree with Daisy that Gatsby asks too much, pathos is still felt at Daisy's abandonment of him and at his lonely death.
Relationship 1: Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby. The relationship at the very heart of The Great Gatsby is, of course, Gatsby and Daisy, or more specifically, Gatsby's tragic love of (or obsession with) Daisy, a love that drives the novel's plot.