What Does The Green Light Symbolize In The Great Gatsby

Belief is defined as “an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.” Gatsby believed truly in the green light, a representation of the perfect ideal that the human race can never quite reach, an ideal of a perfect life that eludes humans even still. Upon Gatsby’s death, however, this belief seems to die with him, leaving Nick with nothing but a disillusionment with his surroundings and a cynical view of human nature and the American Dream itself as nothing more than a green light; a seemingly obtainable future that is in actuality so far behind us that we cannot reach it. Nick believes the American Dream has fallen into obscurity, ushered out by Gatsby’s death, the symbolic “last man” who represented the last breath of hope and life in a seemingly otherwise unforgiving society. In the first …show more content…
This is shown how he constantly reached for it (“[Gatsby] stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and as far as I was from him I could’ve sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward, and distinguished nothing except a single green light (Fitzgerald 25-26)”) However, what Gatsby does not know that even though he reaches out for the dream, it is already behind him, stuck in his past that he desperately tries to repeat. His obsession with repeating the past is emphasized by his outburst of “’Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can (Fitzgerald 116)!’” Nick paints the past as a “vast obscurity (Fitzgerald 189),” something that is seemingly just out of reach and yet unable to be focused on. Everyone longs for their own green light, and for many theirs is the American Dream—it seems so close that they can almost taste it, and yet they are unaware that they are reaching for something they cannot touch, something that may bring about their demise just as Gatsby’s hope brought about