The Great Gatsby

Gatsby: pages 170-180

I can't believe no one came to his funeral.  The second he stopped spoiling selfish strangers with parties and fun, no one had any use for him.  Fitzgerald reveals at this point in The Great Gatsby that it had been Tom who'd betrayed Gatsby.  Gatsby was murdered because Tom was too much of a coward to admit the truth to Myrtle's husband.  How can Carraway not be bothered by the fact that Daisy didn't bother to make contact with him at all about Gatsby's death?!  She had loved him, or so she claimed.  I think Carraway sums up Daisy and Tom perfectly at the end of this novel.  "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy---they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made" (Fitzgerald, 179). 

I think Fitzgerald wanted us to get a couple messages out of his novel, and I found a quote for each.

theme 1: "Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead" (Fitzgerald, 172).  We need to show the people we care about how much they mean to us before it is too late.

theme 2: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" (Fitzgerald, 180).  We never move on from our past.  Not completely anyway.  We are forever wanting to either change the past or resurrect it.