Discuss the effects of Daisy's incarnation as Gatsby's dream.

Gatsby wanted to return to how things were five years earlier: when their lips touched “she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” (112)  He believes that things will soon be as they once were, only better.  He is very determined in his ideas and he says, in fact: "’I'm going to fix everything just the way they were before,’ he said nodding determinedly. ‘She'll see.’” (117)  

The green light is the vision of Gatsby’s goal.  In a world where Gatsby is powerful because he could essentially obtain anything with his money, Daisy is a challenge to him, because she could not be purchased.  When, at last, Gatsby believes that Daisy is his, he no longer idolizes her. Now that he realizes he has her, she is no longer desirable.  At first, the green light seemed very near.  The green light was physically close to him but he thought he could never actually have it, meaning Daisy.  Money could be viewed in the same sense.  As soon as Gatsby realizes it, it was again a normal green light on a dock.  Therefore, the green light has no more meaning to him and neither does Daisy.  In fact, Daisy had said to Gatsby that she would have called, but “Gatsby himself didn’t believe it … and perhaps he no longer cared.  If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” (162)  Striving towards some ideal is the way by which a man can feel a sense of involvement, a sense of his own identity; Gatsby’s ideal is Daisy and he feels involved in society only during his attempt in conquering her.  Also, the parties Gatsby always organized, were a mean to get Daisy to him and they never worked.  Now that he had her, there was no use in the parties.

When Nick and Gatsby attempt to describe the charm in Daisy's voice, Gatsby says that “her voice [was] full of money.” (120)   With these few words, Nick stumbles across a revelation which changes his entire view of society: "That was it. [he’d] never understood before. It was full of money- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in [her voice], the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it." (120)  At this point, all of Daisy's appeal and beauty are gone, leaving nothing underneath it but money to be admired.  The dream Gatsby has been so inexorably pursuing has turned into dollar bills as he discovers that for years he has been pursuing not love, but cold, hard, money, hidden behind a pretty face.

When Gatsby dies, in the end, without having reached his goal, Nick notices that the green lights on the dock are off.  The trees of Gatsby’s house, that “had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams,” (182) were now bare, like Gatsby’s life had been.  Nick thinks of “when [Gatsby] had first picked out the green light and the end of Daisy’s dock.  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.  He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity…  Gatsby believed in the green light.” (182)  

Gatsby’s life is a failure because he doesn’t achieve what he wants.  Gatsby lacked the insight to understand what was happening.  In fact, Gatsby says it himself: “’Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!’” (111)  He had never truly seen either Daisy or himself, so blinded he was by his dream.  His coldly methodical five-year plan to restore the past would end up as useless as one of the used up matches that Daisy flung so carelessly after lighting a cigarette.

In Chapter VII, Nick remembers that it is his thirtieth birthday. He, like Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy, came East to get away from his past; now that his youth is officially over, he realizes that he may have made a mistake to come East, and begins a period of reevaluation that leads to his eventual decision to return to the Middle West. The Great Gatsby is the story of Nick's initiation into life. His trip East gives him the education he needs to grow up. Nick, in a sense, writes The Great Gatsby to show us what he has learned.

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