What Goes Around Comes Around

A broken man with a big dream,

The careless who discard unwanteds with a flick of their hands,

Three dead bodies.

A narrator watches from afar, appalled at the chaos that unfolds. He is disgusted, done with the artificiality of the East that produces nothing but rotten eggs.

The American Dream is But a Mere Illusion.

Jay Gatsby is the only one who dared to transcend the life he was trapped in, and he soared to build an empire. But he didn’t do this in pursuit of money; he did it for love. Daisy Buchanan, the green light, voices “full of money…”

All delicately intertwined in his mind, Gatsby leaped.

But there was no net.

There was nothing to catch him, and he fell. Hard. Daisy is not who he thought she once was. She’s been wedded to Tom Buchanan, a hulking brute of a husband, and her life has moved on.

And still, Gatsby never gave up on her.

Even when she ran Myrtle Wilson over after tensions between Gatsby and Tom came to a head, Gatsby offered to take the blame for the murder.

As it turned out, George Wilson found out about Myrtle’s infidelity just hours earlier, but he never meant for his beloved to die. No. Now his life wasn’t worth living either. “Crazy enough to kill,” he lunged for Tom Buchanan, who swore his innocence and pointed him to

None other than Jay Gatsby.

His body was found, floating on a mattress in his pool, and just a few feet away, George laid dead, “the holocaust… complete.”

No one deserved to die. The guilty ones escaped unscathed, but the ones from the valley of ashes, the “men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air,” never succeeded in their efforts. Gatsby’s death ushered in the death of the American Dream. This world is cruel, and unfair, and this dreadful Dream is not all it’s cracked up to be.

*****

Or is it?

What if that wasn’t the right story?

What if this Book is But a Mere Illusion?

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.”

In a story pretending to be about the fallacies of the American Dream, Fitzgerald is weaving a very different tale.

Instead, Gatsby is a not a humble man of noble intentions, but of “grotesque and fantastic conceits.”

Instead, Gatsby dropped out of St. Olaf college, a means for an exciting future, because he couldn’t stand doing the work of a janitor to afford his tuition. Never mind that a college education could transform his life- working an honest job displayed a “ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny.”

Instead, Gatsby met Dan Cody, a grossly wealthy man with a yacht. He traveled “three times around the continent” and partied and experienced a lavish life like never before.

Instead, Gatsby’s reassuring smile wasn’t so reassuring after all. It wasn’t real; he had simply discovered “that people liked him when he smiled.”

Instead, Gatsby found himself in cahoots with Meyer Wolfsheim after the death of Dan Cody, who headed a highly illegal gambling scheme.

But Gatsby is not good at this job. Gatsby is careless. Gatsby trips over his lies.

Gatsby was on the verge of confessing to killing Myrtle Wilson, feebly saying, “‘Well, I tried to swing the wheel——’” but Nick jumps to conclusions and asks if Daisy was driving.

The dash in Gatsby’s statement is critical, a reminder of what could have been. Whether Daisy was in the driver’s seat or not, Gatsby was the one with his hands on the wheel.

There’s no telling if Gatsby has resorted to killing people in the past. At the very least, he publicly associates with Wolfshiem, who has killed people. Nowhere in these descriptions is a Great Gatsby, just a lying, cheating, immoral one.

Gatsby loved the thrill of underground wealth more than anything. Well, he loved it more than anything until Daisy reciprocated his feelings. Wolsheim once said, clutching his molar teeth cufflinks: ‘Yeah, Gatsby’s very careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend’s wife.’”

Except that Gatsby did.

The more time Gatsby spends with Daisy, and the more phone calls Gatsby declines, the shakier Wolfhshiem’s operation becomes, and Wolfshiem needs to take out the threat he had become.

Really, Gatsby was nothing more than a business “gonnegtion.”

So when Gatsby is found dead beside George, it couldn’t have possibly been a murder-suicide. It was the chauffeur who killed both of them, “one of Wolfshiem’s protégés.” For George to have been the killer, the readers must accept an unbelievable set of circumstances.

George had to have

walked many miles over several hours

With no sleep

been composed enough to shoot with a clear eye

and a steady hand.

George had to have been such an expert marksman that he could have shot Gatsby, while floating on an air mattress upon his pool, and not have punctured the mattress, when such trauma only left a thin circle of blood in the water.

Nick recounts “shadows of waves,” a “laden mattress,” and even the “small gust of wind” that moved the mattress around the pool, and yet there’s no mention of a gun lying next to George. Why give all the small details when there’s an enormous one being omitted?

Tom claimed George had “a revolver on his pocket’ when he came to his door, but what if he was lying to justify sending him over to Gatsby?

Why wasn’t the gun in Wilson’s pocket when he lay dead on the ground?

This murder was not the work of a devastated car salesman. It was the work of an expert, and

that

changes

the

entire

story.

That Gatsby was simply eliminated in the illegal scheme he was involved in means

he isn’t the man Nick looked up to.

he isn’t the man he said he is,

and he certainly isn’t the man who fell prey to the American Dream

He fell prey to not leading his double life adeptly enough. Maybe he deserved to die.

And maybe Nick deserved to feel devastated and disgusted, because he’s just as dishonest as Gatsby was. Maybe he needed to see his best friend dead to wake up.

Maybe Myrtle didn’t deserve to die, but she clawed her way to the wealthy just as dishonestly as Gatsby did, and look what happened to him; the justice system of T.J. Eckleburg, of his “blue and gigantic” eyes, is nothing if not consistent.

And George Wilson, the poor salesman from the valley of ashes, was caught in the crossfire. He is the consequence for Gatsby’s dirty deeds. And even he wasn’t perfect.

The only issue lies in Daisy and Tom Buchanan. It appears that they have gotten away again, that that have packed up their things and left like they always do when things get difficult. But the truth is that they “drift here and there unrestfully...”

Belonging nowhere and to no one.

Being careless has a cost

Your actions have consequences.

Maybe they’re the true inhabitants of the valley of ashes. Maybe they are “men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”

They live like ghosts, with “something pathetic” in their eyes. They end up alive, but is this a fate worse than death?

There is no doubt that The Great Gatsby has something to say about 1920s America and the American Dream, but that’s not all that it’s about.

What goes around comes around, and James Gatz met his fate. Everyone made poor decisions in this book, and everyone was rightfully affected by them.

But there is a flutter of hope that maybe, just maybe, the people that made it out alive will begin to take responsibility for their actions.

“...tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...”

And be better.