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All critics writing about The Great Gatsby invariably confront that final, stunning—and by now, famous—image of the New World on the novel's last page:
… gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.1
This is, in some ways, an extraordinarily pessimistic passage. Yet the sense of “vanished,” “transitory,” and the repetition of “last,” all give way finally to an imaginative evocation for the reader of that “enchanted moment,” full of promise, wonder, and awe. Accordingly, like so many other aspects of this ambiguous text, the possible meanings of Fitzgerald's words diverge, split off in two directions, and enact at another level the movement of the novel's final image: boats beating against the current.
Most literary critics attend to this duplicity, for most have suspected that it is bound up with the novel's final meaning. Again, duplicity in the text itself doubles and makes a pair with another movement toward synthesis. Needless to say, this dialect between the primitive notions of “away” and “together” may be permutated on as many levels (e. g., social,