What is Gatsby looking at?  What does Carraway see?: Psychoanalytic / Marxist Interpretations

        "'If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay,' said Gatsby.  'You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.'

        Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said.  Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.  Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her.  It had seemed as close as a star to the moon.  Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."

[ . . . ]

        "And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.  He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.  He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

        Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will  run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . .  And one fine morning--

        So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (N.Y.: Scribners, 1925) 94, 182.