Significance Of The Green Light In The Great Gatsby

Emma Yeatman

Ms. O’Flanigan

A Block

The American Dream in the Great Gatsby

Jay Gatsby is a monetarily successful man living on West Egg in New York in an attempt to remain close to his past lover Daisy. He is transfixed by a green light hung at the end of her dock, and often spends his nights staring at it. His pursuit of Daisy drives forward the plot of the novel and can be compared to an American’s relentless chase of material success. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the motif of the green dock light is used to develop the theme of the impossibility of a dream. The narrator’s mentions of it directly coincide with moments Gatsby falls short of his dream of winning back Daisy, highlighting his pursuit of something uncatchable, getting close enough to his

Fitzgerald first uses the green dock light to parallel the impossible pursuit of dreams when it is presented as unreachable and difficult to distinguish. When narrator Nick Carroway makes his way home after meeting with Tom and Daisy, he runs across Gatsby staring across the bay and remarks that, “-he stretched out his arm toward the dark water in a curious way…-and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock” (21). The word “distinguished” in this passage is interesting, as it suggests that the dock light is incredibly difficult to make out even when presented with nothing else. It is presented as nebulous, it might be a light but then again it might not. This parallels with Gatsby’s vision for Daisy. What is in Gatsby’s mind is a dream of a person, hard to distinguish since Gatsby constantly adds on to it. This