And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, the closing pages of the novel reflect at length on the American Dream. They hark back to our first glimpse of Gatsby reaching out over the water towards the Buchanan’s green light, a metaphor and respresentation of hope, especially for the future. Narrator Nick Carraway notes that Gatsby’s dream was “already behind him” then, in other words, it was impossible to attain.