Gatsby's green light explained

Why is The Great Gatsby great?  You don't want to get me started, but here I go anyways:

First, it was remarkable for someone to step up and question the validity of the American Dream.  It just was not usually done.  Fitzgerald was not against the Dream in general; rather, he was of the opinion that people had lost sight of what had once made the Dream so great.

Evidence Gatsby and his green light.  Jay looked across the bay at a light that seared his brain.  His dream seemed so close and infinitely far away at the same time, that feeling any of us gets when we have striven for a goal so long that when we reach the precipice, when it seems just off of our fingertips, the anticipatory angst devours us.  Then, he reached his dream and Daisy seemed to be, at last, forever his.  As it turned out, though, the reality did not approach the grandeur of the fantasy.  Daisy and her beautiful voice had very little to say because her own dreams had withered and died, revealing her to be only a shell of humanity.  She was bored with her aristocratic life and disenchanted about her future.  While Gatsby sparked a temporary flicker of spirit in Daisy, that fizzled out when she found out he was a criminal.  Though she was not much better than he was, all she had was her reputation - notoriety based only on the images she projected to the world and not on reality.

As the book ended, Fitzgerald had Nick sum it up when he wrote:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound.  And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until I gradually became aware of the old island here that flowered once for the Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh green breast of the new world.  Its vanished trees, the trees that once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Fitzgerald here compares Gatsby's green light to the greenery that lay before the Dutch sailors as they approached the shoreline.  They began to dream of the tremendous new world they could create on this continent.  It was a great dream, but Fitzgerald seemed to believe that the emptiness of many American citizens - like Gatsby, who had turned bootlegger for wealth; Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who had unspeakably immense wealth but struggled with nihilism (feelings of nothingness, emptiness) every day; George Wilson, whose listless existence represented all of the impoverished of America, and his wife, Myrtle who represented those of the impoverished who would do almost anything to escape that world - showed how much we had ruined the settlers' dreams for this land.  Nick realized it too.  He went on:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.  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.  He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Like many who believe the dream is now about being wealthy, powerful and happy, Gatsby found out that integrity matters, that it is important in the end to stand for something besides the accumulation of property.  Daisy and Tom had achieved the dream that many seek, but they still had to live between their ears, knowing day in day out that others wanted to be like them and not knowing why, because they had lost interest in their own existence.  That is why, once people attain their dream mansions and trophy spouses, they are often disappointed by the fact that they cannot stop striving, first because they become addicted to the thrill of acquiring, and secondly because, when they wake up in the morning, their human spirit will gnaw at them to keep striving and achieving.  If one's only goal is the accumulation of wealth, after a while the material world just seems redundant.

Fitzgerald recognized that for many of us, this information will not be helpful because the siren song of material prosperity is as beautiful and mesmerizing as it is dangerous.  Though many of us will feel this to be true at some point in our lives, most will continue to sail towards those voices.  As Fitzgerald put it:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....  And one fine morning -

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Like Gatsby - and some would say, like Fitzgerald himself - we recognize that our lives have to be about more than consumption, but when we are "living in the moment," basking in luxury, this is hard to see.