Green light

We trust Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as we do Ishmael in Moby Dick. Early on, the always-a-little-flushed Daisy hints at unhappy messy endings as do Gatsby’s shady transactions. Detached, like Nick, we take no sides. But the sudden violent sequence in the last pages, malicious and unbelievably wrong, inspires indignation. Caught off guard, we hurriedly make up for our equivocation. We repudiate Daisy and her society and embrace Jay as the great Gatsby.