“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

Step into the dazzling, deceptive world of the 1920s—a world bathed in champagne, jazz, and whispered secrets. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald invites us to peer beyond the shimmering curtain of the American Dream, exposing the illusions that lie at its glittering heart. This is not just a love story. It is a haunting elegy for a generation intoxicated by wealth, ambition, and the desperate need to reinvent oneself.

Set in the summer of 1922, the novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and World War I veteran who rents a modest house in West Egg, Long Island. His neighbor is none other than the enigmatic Jay Gatsby, a millionaire whose lavish parties draw the elite of New York society—and whose soul remains unreachable, hidden behind smiles, rumors, and a relentless pursuit of a dream long lost.

At its core, The Great Gatsby is a meditation on illusion and identity. Gatsby, a self-made man, is consumed by his desire to rewrite the past and win back Daisy Buchanan, the woman he once loved. Daisy, meanwhile, is both a symbol of beauty and the embodiment of emptiness—trapped in a loveless marriage and a life of superficial luxury. As Nick is drawn into their orbit, he becomes both witness and participant in a tragic story of obsession, corruption, and faded glory.

“You can’t repeat the past.” – “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

But Gatsby’s personal tragedy is only part of the story. Fitzgerald’s novel is also a scathing critique of the American Dream itself—what it promises, what it withholds, and what it destroys. In the glittering mansions of Long Island and the bleak wastelands of the “valley of ashes,” he paints a world where money has replaced meaning, and where hope is both beautiful and doomed.