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Just about any writing teacher will tell you to “Write what you know.” In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote what he knew: The excess and corruption of his time. It’s impossible to read Gatsby as something other than a cautionary tale. In short, Fitzgerald seems to say to his readers, “Do what I say, not what I did.”

Video Transcription:

I said Gatsby was a ghost story. But not just for the characters. For Fitzgerald, too. More on Fitzgerald’s ghosts, right after this.

Gatsby is haunted by Daisy. Haunted by his obsession with Daisy and everything she represents. Nick is haunted by Gatsby. Haunted by his obsession with Gatsby and everything HE represents.

But there’s a bigger haunting at work here. The hidden struggle behind the ghost story.

The tip of that iceberg floats into view in the last chapter, when Nick says: “After Gatsby’s death, the East was haunted for me …”

Fitzgerald struggled to come to terms with the 1920s. The excesses of those times seemed to haunt him the way the East haunted Nick.

So this book of his? Was it a search for redemption? And did he find it?

If you were about to answer, “yes …YES!” you may be a hopeless romantic … or you may not have read the book. Or you may have missed the book’s last line, the one that reads, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Fifteen years after Gatsby’s publication, they carved those words on the author’s tomb. Say what you will about Fitzgerald. Just don’t say, “And he lived happily ever after.”