Uprooted from their native "bored, swollen, sprawling towns beyond the Ohio" to Paris or, closer to home, Long Island, they at first reveled in the freedom that supporting their lives on the strength of their own ambitions entailed. Gatsby's ambition was love. But when that love is finally and conclusively denied, nothing is left to take its place. The last support buckles.
What remains after the collapse, Nick realizes, is a twilight world populated only by brute material forms without the spiritual content necessary to make them truly "real." This is the true face of the Lost Generation: no longer hoping for a message of salvation that never arrives, and "perhaps" no longer even caring. Nick imagines Gatsby shivering at the prospect of spending the rest of his life among the other "poor...
In Gatsby's case, the end came suddenly; even if it hadn't, the Crash was looming.
Confronted with this vision, Nick -- himself among the lost, estranged from his own origins in the "old warm world" -- decides to return to the West rather than risk suffering the same fate. Gatsby's dream, Nick tells himself, was actually to return to his own origins, to find himself again in the South Dakota he had not so much fled as lost. After all, he says, 30 is too old to confuse honor with deceit.
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. Print.
