The Great Gatsby

Gatsby's reunion with Daisy was not a failure of meeting but a failure of containment. For half a decade, he had not been in love with Daisy Buchanan, but with the Daisy of his memory—a luminous, flawless idea expanded to mythic proportions by absence and desire. The real Daisy, charming and shallow, could not contain everything Gatsby had imagined. His dream was a vessel of infinite capacity; she was a human being of very finite dimensions. He showed her his world—the mansion, the parties, the shirts—as if presenting offerings to a goddess who had, unbeknownst to him, long since stepped down from her altar. Her reactions—polite, amused, slightly bewildered—were catastrophically ordinary. Then came the fatal moment of success: her presence in his arms, in his house, as his. This was the crisis. What destroyed Gatsby was not failure but success: Daisy was real, present, and finite, and no real person could bear the weight of five years of perfected longing without cracking under the impossible pressure of it. The dream, which had sustained him, now began to poison the reality it had created. The green light was extinguished not by distance, but by proximity. He had won the prize, only to discover it could not possibly be what he had fought for.