Fitzgerald's hopeless and reminiscent tone shows how he feels about how people treat the things they love and want the most.

Fitzgerald says "and as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes..." The word moon makes the reader think of the night and the word night is usually correlated with struggles and obstacles. Then the section that says "inessential houses began to melt away" those houses are being compared to the struggles in the night, so when they "melt away" it is like the struggles are melting away. Then later it says "I became aware of the old island" this is like when people have a dream there will always be obstacles in the way and so those obstacles make the dreamer lose sight of that dream. Fitzgerald is saying that we need to let the world be still, like the shore that night, and let the obstacles "melt away" so people can focus on their dream, which at that time, and still today, was the American Dream.

In the twenties, when this book was written, the was a small sexual revolution. People were more open about the topic of sex. Fitzgerald used that new openness, when he correlates seeing the new world from the shore to seeing a breast. He is saying that seeing the new world puts the same gleam or sparkle in a man's eye as seeing a breast.

Humans are always looking in the past, but want a great future. He says that "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. " Then he says " So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." both of these quotes talk about a humans struggle between the future and the past. The second quote is a metaphor that compares people to boats going against a current. People are always trying to move to the future but the past keeps pulling them back.

In this passage Fitzgerald is basically saying that humans are always striving and dreaming and hoping for a better future ,and that they should not lose sight of their dreams and hopes just because a few obstacles get in their way. We have to "beat" on and not let the "current" of life push us back.