The opening and closing scenes provide a frame that exalts Gatsby, first, to a plane above the sordid people around him and then, at the end, in his tragic failure, to nothing less than a microcosm of the failure of the American Dream. Gatsby, who wants to rewind the tape of his life and get it "right" with Daisy the second time, is like the first settlers who wanted to build something fresh and new in America, something better than what Europe had wrought—and, like Gatsby, failed.
Both the opening and the ending also offer needed information. The opening provides background about Nick, and the ending brings closure as Nick has a final meeting with Jordan and runs into Tom one last time.
When he sees her again, Nick has awkward lunch with Jordan and describes her as if she is not real to him, more like a newspaper illustration:
She was dressed to play golf and I remember thinking she looked like a good illustration, her chin raised a little, jauntily, her hair the color of an autumn leaf
He wonders for a moment if he regrets not pushing the relationship further, then decides no.
Nick happens to run into Tom and tries to snub him, but nevertheless Nick hears, in brief, Tom's side of the story of Gatsby's end. We learn that Tom did lead Wilson to believe that Gatsby ran over Myrtle, leading Wilson to kill Gatsby. Tom's take is that Gatsby had it coming. Nick is not satisfied with this answer but attains some sense of closure, and he is able to write his famous paragraph:
I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made
When analyzed together, the opening and closing scenes of The Great Gatsby are what frame this novel as an American tragedy.
Within the first couple of pages the narrator notes, "...I had the familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer." There is an air of newness and hopefulness as the author goes on to describe West Egg. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald opens with a Shakespere-esque warning: " 'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.' ” The reader also gets the weightiness of power and importance as the narrator introduces us to grandeur of the setting, and reveals to us Tom.
And like any powerful tragedy, The Great Gatsby ends in not one, but two deaths. Further, Daisy goes back to Tom, Gatsby's life is left unhonored, and an overall sense of pointlessness and a lack of fulfillment. The tragedy here is not for Gatsby so much as it is for the idea of progress. Often analyzed to mean the American Dream, the significance of both the opening and closing scenes is in the tragic loss of time and hope.
The Great Gatsby opens and closes with Nick reflecting on his time in New York City and frames one of the novel's primary themes, which is the illusion of dreams.
The novel opens with Nick describing how he wanted "no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart." He goes on to say Gatsby had an "extraordinary gift for hope," but "foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams." This opening perfectly sets up the disappointment that waited for Gatsby as he pursued his dream girl, Daisy, throughout this entire book.
The closing scene expands this idea that dreams of one day achieving all that one's heart's desires are nothing more than illusory. Instead of only Gatsby's dreams being unreachable, according to Nick, everyone's dreams are unreachable. He says, like Gatsby, everyone reaches for their dreams and "will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—." Nick leaves out the final part that Gatsby, while still attempting to reach his dream of being the one man for Daisy, ends up face down, dead in his own pool on a "fine morning."
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