“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – The Great Gatsby.
Since high school (Denise?), I have struggled with the meaning of this final line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. What does it mean, exactly?
It’s a great last line. Melancholic. Wrapping up the human condition with a tidy little boat metaphor, bumping, lapping, with a wave-like alliteration on “b.” Did I think so in high school? Nope. What past had I to be borne back into? My toddlerhood? Junior high school? Junior high ain’t no beckoning green light on the dock, let me tell you.
In my opinion, shared by many others, the last line of The Great Gatsby only begins to make sense if you’re over 40, or better yet, even older than that. Anything with a complex plot centering around obsession, alcohol, self-delusion, and accidents, seem to make more sense the older you get. In other words, old enough to have something of a past; old enough to have attempted things in life that have not panned out; old enough to know that, well, shit happens.
To be sure, it is a rather cold ending. The current in life – it’s always there – sweeping us along. We can beat against it with out little oars, which are wholly insufficient, for they are made of ego and pride and thoughts of what might have been. We refuse, it seems, to go with the current like everything else in the stream. It is also within the human condition to want to swim upstream, as if only the dead fish go with the current.
Fish that are alive and well will swim only so fast as to match the current, knowing that beating against it trying to make distance is a futile effort. The freshest oxygen, they know, is right where you are. There is less oxygen, less living, the further back you drift. On the other hand, the smart fish (the ones that live) will recognize opportunity and bolt forward on occasion. It is a matter of adroit timing.
But Gatsby had something else in mind, me thinks. What he feared was not swimming fast enough to match the current, and thereby being borne into the past. But he also feared having to relive the past. He had tried to remake himself only to discover that you cannot really do that. You are you. Dwelling on what might have been is like breathing the same air twice.
The best explanation I have ever heard comes from television’s The Wire, an HBO show which ran in the mid-2000s and which, to my mind, is the very best television show ever produced. One of its characters, Deangelo Barksdale, tried to explain Gatsby in a prison book club setting (yes, there are book clubs in prison, it turns out). Here is what he said:
“The past is always with us; where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it. All that shit matters. Like, at the end of the book, you’know, boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right, you can say you’re somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are and what happened before is what really happened. It don’t matter that some fool say he different ’cause the things that make you different is what you really do, what you really go though.”
Fish turn their backs on the past because they can only swim in one direction: Forward. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have a past anymore than any of us can deny our pasts. The secret is to make some sort of peace with the past and to know that it has formed you into you.
