Although psychoanalytic criticism believes we are each born with a clean slate, soon that slate is cluttered with images. Even before we have words to label them, we begin working to sort this clutter and make sense of the world around us. If a thing is suitable we keep it or forget it, but if a thing causes us pain, shame, or any number of negative responses, instead of forgetting it we repress it into our subconscious where it festers and poisons our waking thoughts and actions. As Fitzgerald puts it, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Much of our conscious present is made of dealing with the suppressed and unconscious images of our past. In life this battle with the past can feel like we’re paddling upstream, and in Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” each character fights the current in their own unique manner. Jay Gatsby, subject of the book’s title, was “borne back ceaselessly into the past” by fighting the repression associated with it. Having been raised in a lower class family, he spent his adulthood attempting to establish himself among the “upper” classes. However, his true desires may not have been purely social or economic.

In our pre-verbal period of infancy we experience a life of fantasy, an illusion, but it is shattered when we find things around us have an order and we begin to realize our place within that order. We learn our mother is separate from us and does not feel what we feel. We cannot control her with our minds and she does not feel pain when we inflict it upon ourselves. Further, we find she does not belong to us but in fact belongs to our father. We may spend the rest of our lives trying to replace the hole this leaves in our gut. Gatsby believed he could fill the void by aspiring to win the love of Daisy. She was of another world than ours, yet something which seemed to remind us of the illusions of our infancy. A relationship with Daisy could restore that feeling of complete intimacy we once thought we shared with our mothers. But just as our idea of that relationship with our mother was a fallacy, so is the idea we can be “one” with the woman we believe will replace her.

Daisy herself dealt with her own issues regarding the replacement of that illusory world with a concrete, verbal reality. But in her disappointment she adopted the protective shield of distance from others; she became unwilling to experience intimacy in her current life as a reaction to the painful loss of a perceived intimacy from her infant hood. Instead of allowing herself to draw close to Gatsby, she felt, possibly on a subconscious level, that he wanted too much of her. She perceived his desire for intimacy, and although his desire may have been rooted in the same place as her own needs and desires, her reaction was exactly the opposite.

In the closing lines of “The Great Gatsby”, Fitzgerald summarizes a theme we had revisited often within the novel. We press on, and we may feel as though we are swimming upstream. We never get what we want, even if we don’t truly know what it is we desire. We dip the oars into the water hoping they will drive us into the future, but the very act of dipping in means we dredge up the past. However we try to reach for the green light across the bay, we are still forced to face the darkness inside us, even if that darkness is beyond our reach as well.

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