The past in Gatsby

9 quotes, in the order they happen.

The quotes

a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock

Nick sees Gatsby reaching for a light across the water. It is Daisy's dock. Gatsby does not say her name yet.

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: "I never loved you."

Gatsby does not want Daisy now. He wants the last four years erased.

Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself

James Gatz invented Jay Gatsby. He invented a man and then tried to become him.

Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!

Nick says you cannot. Gatsby thinks you can. The book is about that fight.

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it

The lawn is Daisy's. The dream is already behind him. He does not know.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us

The light was a dock lamp. Gatsby made it a future. The future keeps moving away.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past

The last line. We row forward. The water takes us back.

You can't repeat the past.

Nick says the ordinary thing. Gatsby does not believe ordinary things.

I never loved you

Four years, wiped with one sentence. Daisy will not give him that sentence.