The Great Gatsby
In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." I've tried to live by that, though it gets harder every summer. Especially that summer I moved East to learn the bond business and found myself renting a bungalow next to a man who threw parties every Saturday night.
His name was Gatsby. I didn't know him at first. No one did. They came to his house by the hundreds—celebrities, chorus girls, stockbrokers, senators—and they drank his champagne, danced on his lawn, crashed his cars into his ornamental fountains. But no one was ever invited. They simply appeared, like moths to a light they could not name. And Gatsby himself would stand alone on his marble steps, watching the green dock light across the Sound, stretching his arms toward it as though it were a star he might pluck from the water.
I learned the truth slowly, in pieces, from Jordan Baker's low, careless voice. Gatsby was not born James Gatz of North Dakota. He had invented himself—every gesture, every "old sport," every white suit and pink tie. He had done it for Daisy Buchanan, the golden girl of Louisville, the one who had promised to wait and then married the brutal, wealthy Tom instead. Gatsby bought his mansion directly across from her dock. He threw those parties hoping she might wander in one night. She never did, until I brought her.
The afternoon they met again, the rain fell hard on his lawn, and Gatsby trembled like a man seeing his own soul. He had believed, with a romantic violence that would destroy him, that the past could be repeated. He was wrong. The green light receded. The boats against the current were borne back ceaselessly into the past.