Life is a cycle-it begins anew each summer with it’s smells of promise and hope; and it concludes each fall, as the weather stiffens and the wind calls us back towards our home. In America, you can be anyone, do anything, and go anywhere. The story of Jimmy Gatz is the American story. A no name from the Midwest who arrives in the city that never sleeps: the city of endless possibilities. Thus it is tale of otiose excesses whose characters have no raison d’être, only vague velleities and base desires. In Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, people haven’t been to church in ages. Indeed, God is Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, the omnipresent billboard who sees all sins. God is an advertisement and it is not the presence of the saints but the “proximity of millionaires” that consoles the spirit. 

Can’t repeat the past? he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!

What Fitzgerald is able to do so effortlessly is capture feelings, desires, and emotions that are so exceptionally human. The American is a stubborn breed and becomes inexorable when he puts his mind to something, whether it be virtue or vice. “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart (p. 96). Whether it be possible or merely a fools errand is besides the point. What we believe to see shall become our reality and indeed, because Gatsby’s reality. 
“‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’
‘Can’t repeat the past? he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!'” (p. 110).

In the end, we learn a sober truth: “human sympathy has its limits” (p. 135), at least, the American kind. As Nick turned thirty in the most pathetic of events, he ultimately realizes, perchance gratuitously so, that each decades new evils lie in wait to befall us. It is up to us whether we choose to march forward in futility in hopes for something bigger, better, and brighter; or to cast our gaze to a halcyon yet illusive past which remains always out of reach. It is this obstinately stubborn, inexorable human spirit that Fitzgerald illustrates so well. Not because he shows a sharp contrast of virtue and vice; but rather, each character is at best painted as an ambiguous admixture of both. “‘Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,’ he suggested. ‘After that my own rule is to let everything alone'” (p. 172). Or in other words, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60)