And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I become aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes- a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all humans 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.
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 …show more content…
Fitzgerald uses the word “pap” on page 110 (The Great Gatsby) at a significant moment in Gatsby’s vision when he kisses Daisy for the first time: “the chance to climb alone to the pap of life and gulp the incomparable milk of wonder”(110). “Pap” is another word for “breast.” Tredell believes if you link “pap” with “breast”, you would have “one of those complex patterns of imagery connecting different and sometimes widely separated parts of the novel which is characteristic of Gatsby” (Tredell 40). He then states how “ ‘the fresh green breast of the new world’ can be seen as an earthly, territorial embodiment of ‘pap of life’ but, like Myrtle’s breast, its earthiness and seductiveness make it vulnerable; it can be ripped torn” (40). He then points out that a tearing has taken place. The “vanished trees” had “made way” for Gatsby’s house (Fitzgerald 180). Tredell points out that “Nick’s verb ‘make way’ is decorous personification of the trees… which suggests that the presumed innocence even of the new world is compromised: the trees ‘pandered in whispers’ ” (Tredell 41). He then compared the phrase “in whispers” to Marlow’s comment on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “the wilderness… had whispered to him things... of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating” (41). The phrase “the