Dutch Sailors' Eyes

"...till gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes, a fresh green breast of the new world." -F. Scott Fitzgerald

“That’s an advertisement.”

Arguably the greatest MMA fighter of all time, Dagestani Khabib Nurmagomedov defined his strategy in the octagon: “I take people into deep waters and they discover themselves.” A century after its publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby does the same, plunging readers into the depths of human desire, ambition, and illusion, forcing us to confront ourselves, our restlessness, and the costs of living anywhere but the present.

Khabib “The Eagle” Nurmagomedov

The novel remains unsettlingly relevant. Fitzgerald assembles a dark work, a cautionary tale that exposes the perils of stalking shallow illusions. It throws harsh light on society’s hollowness and superficiality and stands as an elegiac testimony to America’s restless spirit. Gatsby is a cracked, hangover mirror that reflects a sober truth about who we are and what we might still be. At its core, the book warns us about the danger of living anywhere but the present—either in a utopian future or an idealized past—and hints, shyly, at a different path.

Narrated by Nick Carraway, the novel tracks the two faces of Jay Gatsby and his compulsive pursuit of wealth, status, and the unattainable Daisy Buchanan. It exposes a void at the center of the so-called American Dream. The book flopped with critics and readers when it first appeared in 1925. But despite Fitzgerald’s claim that “there are no second acts in American lives,” Gatsby enjoyed just that. During World War II, the Red Cross handed pocket-sized copies of the novel to GIs, and in the postwar years, it gained critical acclaim from scholars like Lionel Trilling. Today, it is canonically cemented in syllabi and serves as a lodestar of twentieth-century American literature.

Gatsby endures for myriad reasons. Foremost is its prose—wry, sophisticated, nostalgic, and syrupy smooth. Fitzgerald’s sentences lift off and then collide within the chaotic worlds of Long Island’s Gold Coast, Manhattan Island, and the downtrodden Valley of Ashes. They can be rhythmic—“there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired”—hypnotic—“he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder”—and perfectly blunt: “Roaring noon.”

To truly comprehend the novel, one should start at the end, with its iconic final four paragraphs—arguably the most breathtaking prose in American literature. Standing in front of Gatsby’s empty mansion and looking out over the Long Island Sound, Nick ponders “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes.” In that moment, Fitzgerald fuses America and Gatsby into a single, lucid mirage. Nick imagines this stretch of shore as the place where the American Dream first blossomed and seems to want to linger forever in the “orgastic” and “transitory” moment when the continent “had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams…face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” But his satisfaction and happiness hover either in a vanished past or in some ever-receding future, never in the present moment. The ending primes the pump for the book’s meditative nature. It reframes its set pieces as variations on a single theme: illusion, restlessness, and the spiritual cost of refusing to live where you actually are.

The answer comes in the novel’s central enigma: Why does Nick, an educated and perceptive young man, remain captivated by Gatsby, despite acknowledging his frailties—“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion”—and his deceptions—“What part of the Middle West?” [Nick] inquired casually. “San Francisco.” It is Gatsby’s relentless hope, his audacious dreams, and his refusal to quit that hold Nick’s attention. Yet Nick recognizes that Gatsby’s whole persona is childish cosplay—a fantasy “that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent.” But Nick holds true, forever admiring the purity of Gatsby’s stubborn idealism that drives him forward…to his death in his swimming pool. Nick senses the fatal danger in his friend, the striving for something greater despite the fact that he also knows that it is all vanity and deception and hollowness. Nick and the reader live in that tension, and it is supremely enchanting.

Gatsby’s reckless pursuits collide with the seemingly grounded, comforting joys of Nick’s Midwestern past, especially as he remembers returning home by train at Christmas. The tone in this flashback buzzes with nostalgic warmth, edging toward Hallmark sentimentality, yet it holds back just enough to preserve its verisimilitude and show how powerful memory can be. We almost live inside the snow-globe beauty he evokes—the “chatter of frozen breath,” “long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands,” and “the real snow, our snow”—until he reaches the final crescendo: “That’s my middle-west—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”

Yet Nick’s sense of beauty and fellowship floats above the Midwestern hoi polloi who actually haul the wheat, milk the cows, and build those now lost Swede towns. His nostalgia edits them out. This blind spot paradoxically sparks his great epiphany: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” He dimly grasps that their “deficiency” lies in trying to live as Eastern dreamers rather than Western realists, but he never fully accepts what that implies. Instead, he stays undyingly loyal to Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope,” a loyalty that tempts him to abandon the present and live inside a utopian dream stretched between two opposing horizons—an idealized East and an idealized West. Nick has been dragged into deep waters too; he can name the danger, but he can’t quite renounce the dream.

Caught between Gatsby’s fevered future and his own sentimental past, Nick never learns how to live in the present—but the novel does not leave us without a guide.

Fitzgerald hides his answer in a nearly forgotten figure: Michaelis, the lowly coffee shop owner in the Valley of Ashes. Only Michaelis serves as an eyewitness, comforter, and moral guide, offering clarity and mercy amid tragedy. While the Buchanans retreat into money and Nick retreats into memory, he stays put in the Valley of Ashes. He sits with George Wilson through the long, awful night after his wife Myrtle’s death, makes him coffee, asks him questions, and tries to keep him from coming apart. When Wilson stares up at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and mutters, “God sees everything,” Michaelis sees what Wilson is looking at and is shocked, exclaiming, “That’s an advertisement.” In that moment, he offers the only honest theology in the book: that false gods do not see, do not judge, and do not save, exposing the hollowness of what we falsely revere.

Michaelis has little money, no pedigree, no myth attached to his name, yet he behaves with a compassion and steadiness that no one from East Egg or West Egg could ever muster. Fitzgerald saw all this and staged a spectacle of false worship and self-destruction—Gatsby’s dream, Daisy’s carelessness, Tom’s brutality—and quietly set a humble man in their midst who simply stays, listens, and serves. If Gatsby shows us the danger of living entirely inside a fantasy, Michaelis shows us the modest, unglamorous habits that make real community and real mercy possible.

This, finally, is what The Great Gatsby teaches us. Beware of mistaking longing for virtue, ambition for fulfillment, and restlessness for progress. The anxious striving that drives these characters—toward money, status, romance, reinvention—never lets them rest where they actually are.

St. Francis de Sales warned of the same spiritual disease that consumes Fitzgerald’s characters. In his Introduction to the Devout Life, he writes, “Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset… What is anything in comparison with the peace of heart?” All the major figures in Gatsby suffer from that anxiety, and it destroys them. Only Michaelis lives as St. Francis counsels: quietly, attentively, in the present, extending mercy instead of chasing illusion.

A hundred years old, The Great Gatsby still takes us into deep waters and demands that we swim—not in pursuit of some shimmering green light fantasy on some distant dock, but in the difficult work of knowing ourselves.