"THE GREAT GATSBY". F.SCOTT
FITZGERALD. 
CORINNENOTES
"THE GREAT GATSBY". F.SCOTT
FITZGERALD.
QUESTION 4.
CONSIDERING WHO LIVES AND WHO DIES WITHIN THE NOVEL WHAT MIGHT FITZGERALD BE SAYING ABOUT IDEALISM AND DREAMERS?
It is rather worrying (and decidedly pessimistic) that Tom lives where as Gatsby dies. Tom is undoubtedly a realist who recognises that he is able to turn a "garage into a stable" through money, indeed he is even able to buy Daisy. Tom is representative of the society in which Gatsby exists, preoccupied by materialism and even proud of it. For Tom the American dream is firmly rooted in the possession of wealth rather than the more spiritual nature of Gatsby and Nicks' version. In a way Tom dominates the novel;he dominates everyone and everything, and Nick of course drinks with him before he meets Gatsby and shakes his hand after Gatsby (and the dream's) death. The Buchanans, as a type, go on forever, survive everything. Tom is without the vulnerability of Gatsby and is therefore able to survive the emptiness of the valley of ashes and the meaningless splendour of his house. Unlike Gatsby, Tom is a case of what you see is what you get.
So why does Fitzgerald have the obviously unlikeable Tom live while the more idealist, and endearing, Gatsby dies? Fitzgerald's view of the dreamers is somewhat negative. For him (and it is a recurrent theme throughout his work) the American Dream is not an index of aspiration but a function of deprivation. To believe in the dream, in Gatsby's society, is almost a sin, preordaining yourself to death at the hands of the less sentimentally minded "fast drivers". In one of his letters Fitzgerald wrote "America's greatest promise is that something is going to happen,and after a while you get tired of waiting because nothing happens to people except that they grow old, and nothing happens to American art because America is the story of the moon that never rose". For Fitzgerald the dream is an illusion, a promise from the past that is never realised and has instead given way to Tom and an accidental society. In such a world realists survive and dreamers (and their dreams) die.
This idea is carried on through the character of Gatsby and the novel is pervaded by the sense that something has been lost, a chance missed, a dream doomed. Gatsby comes to orient his life in relation to the "green light"."Seen from across the water - and everything else which separates him from Daisy, the green light offers Gatsby a suitably inaccessible focus for his yearning, something to give definition to desire, something to stretch his arms towards, rather than circle his arms around. The fragile magic of the game depends on keeping the green light in the distance. Lights too closely approached may well lose their supernatural lustre and revert to ordinariness." (Tony Tanner).Any dreams therefore are unobtainable and to focus your life on them, while an endearing characteristic, is ultimately tragic.
The reality of the dream for Gatsby is shown by how easily Tom breaks it. All Tom has to do is state the times and places of his sexual possession of Daisy and Gatsby is pretty much done for. The identity of Jay Gatsby breaks, rather like glass, under the hard malice of Tom's reality. By this point, when the dream appears within touch, it is already "behind him". Daisy stays bought, and time cannot be erased, however much Gatsby would like to. For Gatsby, and by extension all dreamers, the past is something which can be "wiped out forever". The novel shows that stray shaving foam and graffiti can be wiped away but not the past. By believing that he can stop the past Gatsby is dooming himself to death be it literally or metaphorically.
I personally feel that Nick believes in the green light even more than Gatsby does, the final paragraphs of the novel are Nick talking after all and the novel is characterised by his "I think", "I suspect", "possibly", "perhaps", "I have an idea that". Possibly everything which Nick states did occur to Gatsby but possibly it didn't. As well as being a disenchanted moralist Nick is also a committed over-dreamer. He survives because he is a spectator in the game, it is Gatsby who is the performer. The eternal idealist in Nick surfaces in his regression to the west at the end of the novel. Gatsby's dream is dead but it won't stop Nick, and therefore society, from searching for that all illusive American Dream.