God was murdered.  Supposedly the being “possessed some deficiency…which made [him] subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”  (Fitzgerald, 176)  The American Dream crept up from the east and stabbed the western faced being in the back.  TJ Eckleburg nearly witnessed the whole incident play out, but a large gust of wind came out of nowhere and blew an amalgamation of ash onto the doctor’s glass frames during the incident.  Now it’s a fool’s guess as to why the whole conflict transpired.  However, one fool, daring enough to take on the explanation of the investigation, is F. Scott. Fitzgerald.  Fitzgerald claims to be the unknown witness of the crime and additionally claims to know the details concerning the entire series of events that only a member of the occurrences would internally battle with daily and fall ill from with golden tipped guilt.  The Minnesota-born author supposedly recounts said details in his memoir, The Great Gatsby, a novel describing the key conflicts and aftermaths of the events while using dissimilar names and locations.  Fitzgerald says the sixth chapter of the book, features one passage in which Nick Calloway, the narrator of the novel, identifies the key components of the entire story and how they divinely affect and reprehensively define Gatsby, the main character of the novel.  The soul of this passage, a collection of letters, words, and sentences exhibits the underlying and eternal conflict of the natural world with its religiously and spiritually accountable creator against the industrialized, concrete jungle of success that discharged from the womb of the American Dream.  The analysis of that passage is below.

Gatsby, enamored by the romantic concept formed by the revitalization of self and the realization of wealth for the conquest of love, “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” (Fitzgerald, 99)  To secure his heart’s desire, Gatsby, at a young age, set forth on a maculate quest to theoretically create and intimately understand an imaginative, intangible figure that he would consequently slyly cloak over himself during the social hours, but abstractly tremble from in, the distant presence of the green light – a light that bullied and sparkled as “he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace.”  (Fitzgerald, 99)  Gatsby dreamed himself a life that made him great; he demanded perfection, mandated the actualization of the legend of his historical, divine fertilization, and craved the gleaming “quality of eternal reassurance.”  (Fitzgerald, 48)  Gatsby had begun a journey on the path to Platonic idealism, a theory in and of itself that stipulated the existence of the ability of all objects, both animate and inanimate, to reach perfection.  Perfection, unobtainable by the corporeal being, was thrust into nurtured oblivion, as Gatsby invented the great man – a great man, individually favored more than his brother, personally deemed more powerful than his Father, but directly committed to a bewildering, social death in holy a fashion.  Jay, the notion of James, would “die for the sins of others” and drag the dreamer into demise.  No dream would fully be achieved and the “outlet for his imagination” (Fitzgerald, 99) would fizzle and pop into a valley of ashes as it self-corrupted by the two opposing forces, nature and society.

Throughout the passage, two conflicting forces battled against each other for dominance in what Nick described as Gatsby’s truer self.  Angelically magical, creative imagery hyperbolically undulated in “a universe of ineffable gaudiness” (Fitzgerald, 99) while it vehemently opposed the unrelenting, industrial, mechanical chaos that burdened Gatsby’s heart with “a constant, turbulent riot.”  (Fitzgerald, 99)  Nick perceived all of Gatsby’s authentic façade as a balancing act; a balancing act of utter impracticality due to its evolution from Platonic Conception.  Nick showed the ludicrous life that Gatsby lived through his littering of oxymoronic phrases.  James Gatz’s transformative reinvention of himself into Gatsby, in Nick’s eyes, was “just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent;” (Fitzgerald, 98) yet “He was a son of God, (Fitzgerald, 98) cautiously revered from Nick’s point of view, but confined to his own absurd “promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” (Fitzgerald, 99)  Nick used these quick spurts of contradictory and incompatible language to manipulatively express his own muddled judgments pertaining to Gatsby’s battle between spirituality and success, and that same battle in relation to America as a whole.  Yet, because Nick ironically perceived himself as a man “inclined to reserve all judgments,” (Fitzgerald, 1) Nick’s own personal façade crumbled as he made wild and possibly true assertions about the man he abhorred and adored.  The use of the oxymoronic language that showed a man, a possible Son of God, who “became contemptuous…of young virgins because they were ignorant” yet later possibly and mystically deflowered them while supposedly being loyal to one, “vulgar and meretricious beauty,” (Fitzgerald, 98) was Fitzgerald’s own foreshadowing interjection and method as to generalize the American Dream and the people who chased after it. 

One of the novel’s main sources of tension stemmed from the juggling of the commercial chasing of the American Dream and the spiritual chasing of true love.  Gatsby, an indirectly self-proclaimed “Son of God” (Fitzgerald, 98) dedicated himself to the Platonically ideal accomplishment of the American Dream for the sake of true love, “and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” (Fitzgerald, 98)  However, for Fitzgerald to have his nonjudgmental narrator compare his ignorant main character to the most holy of people, Fitzgerald danced closely and controversially near the line of blasphemy.  Nevertheless, his novel’s own savior burst forth from the underlying concept that the religion of the novel did not directly represent Christianity.  “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island” (Fitzgerald, 98) and the people of the American East did not worship and pray to the Abrahamic God of the archaic Book.  Their true savior, the server of “the vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty” (Fitzgerald, 99) was success.  Success judgingly presided in The Valley of Ashes and demandingly harnessed the energy of a failure and firmly spat out through the paled yet blood beaten lips of George Wilson, “God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing.”  The American Dream exuded omnipotence.    

The people of the second decade revered the American Dream and in so, had “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  (Fitzgerald, 180)  Meanwhile at his own conception, Gatsby, “a Son of God,” (Fitzgerald, 98) a representation of Nick and the people, “had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger,” a job of humble, grimy beginnings and a representation of the holy hole in a people’s efforts to obtain a mere American meeting in “His Father’s business.” (Fitzgerald, 98)  Fitzgerald had hinted to his previous, foreshadowing interjection: a premature society “faithful to the end” (Fitzgerald, 98) and to a cause of valueless splendor would surely crack and crumble like a fairy supporting “the rock of the world” (Fitzgerald, 99) when reminded that the industrial, hardened, and real “clock ticked on the washstand,” (Fitzgerald, 99) beckoning the call to fall and shatter the daisy scented dream.