A green light burns at the end of a dock across the water, and a man who has invented himself from nothing stands in the darkness reaching toward it, believing that the future can redeem the past. Published in 1925, beneath its jazz-age shimmer lies a parable about the American faith that longing and money can bend time backward. Nick Carraway narrates with the wary tenderness of someone who admires what he knows he should condemn, and the parties at Gatsby's mansion blaze with a splendour that is always, somehow, forlorn. The prose is so precise that nearly every sentence has been quoted, yet the novel's true achievement is structural: it makes the reader feel the exact weight of a dream at the moment it breaks.