Watching Over Nothing
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a story about a man named Nick Carraway who moves to West Egg next door to a mysterious man named Gatsby. In this absolutly amazing novel, Gatsby throws extravagant parties, in hopes of luring the beautiful Daisy to him. Gatsby's undying love for Daisy, Nick’s cousin, controls and drives his life. Nick is thrown into this chaotic and exciting new life with Gatsby and their friends. Gatsby and Nick learn about their world through their constant observing. Both Gatsby and Nick start out as idealists, but they both lose their innocence. Gatsby loses his innocence once he stops observing while Nick loses his innocence through observation.
Gatsby watches Daisy intensely thorough this whole story because she is his light and utopia. When Jordan was recounting the story of when she meets Daisy, who does not drink, Gatsby agrees with Daisy that it is, “a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care” (p.77).  Everyone else is “blind”  from the alcohol that dilutes their chances of achieving their dreams. The use of the word ‘blind’ makes Gatsby seem to be the only one who can, “see” and is the only one who “cares” to achieve his dream of Daisy. Nick first learns of Gatsby’s love for Daisy when Jordan describes the way Gatsby's looks at Daisy as “ a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since” (p.75). Without any words Gatsby was able to promise a romantic utopia to Daisy simply by “looking”.  Gatsby is a character who communicates and lives through his eyes. While Nick is having his first lunch with the Buchanans he notices that Daisy’s “voice was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes, and a bright passionate mouth” (p.9).  Daisy is often described with the word, “bright”. Brightness often is associated with heaven and in this novel Daisy is Gatsby's personified heaven. Gatsby's ability to watch and see and Daisy being, “bright” shows that Daisy is the main object that Gatsby can see. While Nick is thinking about dating Jordan he believes that he does not have true love like Gatsby does because Daisy is to Gatsby a “girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs” (p.80). This further shows that Gatsby is in a world that is “dark” and he cannot see other things besides Daisy. Therefore she is “blinding” for Gatsby because she is so bright she cause him to lose sight of everything else. Gatsby, a character who is described through sight, constantly watches his light, Daisy,  because she is his utopia and dream.
Gatsby’s idealism feeds his dream of Daisy and fuels his life. Gatsby works hard for his dream to win over Daisy, “He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual mouths -- so that she could come over some afternoon.” (p.78) All his life was devoted to win over Daisy, even the house he lived in and who he associated with. He would give out, “starlight” to anyone who came, the symbol of light is heaven and dreams, so by saying this he is giving everyone what they dream of in hopes that his dream will come true as well. Gatsby was able to keep his dream so powerful because he was a very idealist person who, “believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”( p.180) He was able to live out his fantasy because of his endless hope that he was going to get his “light”, which is often a metaphor for dreams and heaven. Gatsby’s light is Daisy.
In the beginning of Gatsby’s and Daisy's affair, Daisy comes over to Gatsby's for tea and Nick notices that, “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (pp.95-96). Gatsby had put so much into his dream that there was no way the dream could live up to his reality. His, “vitality” in his dream was his light in the world. Sadly, Daisy, “tumbled short” and was not who Gatsby dreamed of, even if he could not see this yet. The word “tumbled” literally means to fall suddenly which foreshadows what happens in the novel, how suddenly after Daisy leaves him his life tumbles down and ends because this dream was essential to his life.  
As Gatsby stops watching Daisy from afar he loses his innocence as she gets closer to him. Nick notice after meeting Daisy,  “For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk”(p.14). The light left Daisy's face like at “dusk” where the moonlight is the only light, the very opposite of the “sunshine” Daisy had or her “glowing face” which had guided Gatsby through his life. So the moonlight had shown the reality of the situation and took over Daisy’s glow, leaving Gatsby with nothing.  After Daisy leaves Gatsby for Tom, in the Buchanan's back yard she, “walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight-- watching over nothing”(p.145). The moonlight had finally shed the only real light on this devastating situation for Gatsby. At last, Gatsby had truly lost the light to his world, Daisy, and therefore he could only, “watch over nothing”. The complicating contradiction of watching over nothing, brings together Nick’s realization through the book, that the world is complicated, with Gatsby's loss of his only light in the world, Daisy. So although Gatsby was murdered by Wilson, he really was already dead to the real world. He was living off the fantasy of Daisy and therefore when this illusion was died, so did he. 
Nick holds an idea of a pure and simple view of the world when he first starts in this novel. In the first chapter of the book Nick recalls advice his father gave to him when he was younger, “whenever you feel like criticizing people remember they haven’t had the advantages as you” (p.2). This shows that Nick is a judgmental person and that he comes from a well off family.  “Criticizing” other people means to indicate the flaws of someone else, Nick could do this so often he wouldn’t notice his own and would cause him to come off as arrogant and pompous. In the very beginning of the novel, Nick also claims that his one true carnal value is that he is, “one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (p.59). Not only does he hold others to impossibly high standards, he holds himself to these as well. In the beginning he lives with an, “honest” lifestyle, one with high morals. This is important because this book is about how immoral and deceitful most people are. He believes that,  “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired” (p. 79). He sees people as simple, and the world and everything can be placed into simple categories. He also claims in the first chapter that, “Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window”(p.4). He doesn't want to see the full complicated picture but instead will just focus on single attributes of people.
Like Gatsby, Nick is an observer in this novel. After spending time with Jordan, Nick returns to West Egg and notices a blazing light and “ saw that it was Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar” (p.81). As Daisy is Gatsby’s light. Gatsby and his parties are, “lit” and are Nick’s lights. These lights then guide him to Gatsby and makes him see a new, adventurous world. When Nick first moves in next door to Gatsby and his parties he, “watched his guests diving from the towers of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach” (p.39). Nick is observing and watching Gatsby’s house. He watches people take in the “sun” and once again the light and sun are coming from Gatsby’s. While at his first Gatsby party, Nick’s “eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes”(p.50). Both characters are using their, “eyes” to watch people. This connects the two, showing that both of them are observes in this story. At Tom Buchanan party Nick notices, “Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets streets, and I was too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life ”(p.36). Nick is actively observing this world. He claims that, “causal” watchers are people who are standing in a darkening street. He suggest here that if you only look but do not really watch you will not have light. Light, being a symbol of life and dreams, shows that without really watching you aren’t living. In the end he finds the beauty of the complications and the “variety” of life. His innocence of living in a perfect dream world has been taken away but this makes him a much more compelling, complex and realistic character.
In the beginning of the novel Nick believes in a rigid, judgmental morality. As he  only to matures and grows he begins to understand that the world and people are corrupt and complicated. His best friend Gatsby is a drug lord, the truculent, Tom Buchanan, is having an affair, Daisy his cousin is a gold digger, and even his girlfriend, Jordan, cheats and lies. The day before Tom’s party, Nick wonders around his new and  “began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and the machines gives to the restless eye” (p.56). Nick starts to love his “restless eyes” which means he is constantly watching and observing. He starts to also love the “racy”, and “adventurous” feel of his new life and city.  Racy’s definition is ‘lively and typically mildly titillating sexually’.  By claiming he loves the adventures and raciness of it all he is saying he is finding vitality from his observing  the complicated world and his loss of innocence. While Nick is reminiscing about Gatsby he remembers that even with all of these imperfections of people who “represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn” (p.2) he still loves Gatsby. Nick’s contradiction of love for the attributes he hates shows that he is seeing the complexity of other people and himself. Through his friendship with Gatsby he becomes like the others, a complicated and sinful person.  At Gatsby's first party, Nick,  “Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone before I should begin” (p.42). Not caring if it was right or not, Nick first commits himself in his first dishonest relationship with Jordan. He doesn't not really like her he just believes that is, “necessary” not because he wants to. He is just using her because she was there. This broke his first cardinal rule of being honest.  He stays in this relationship throughout the book until at the end, while everything is crashing down, he breaks up with her,  “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”  He experiences a wide range of conflicting emotions. He is “angry” but also feels “love”.  Yet the love he feels is not even complete, instead he is only, “half” in love. These mixtures of emotions show that he has grown up as a person and he is now, like his friends, complicated and not always sure what the right thing is.  While describing Tom, Nick says, “There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind” (p. 125) Nick learns here that even the “simple” things in life are very confusing and not clear, especially the minds of people. Through his close observations and learns about the corruption and complications of life.
In conclusion, both Gatsby and Nick, break away from their utopian fantasies in this novel and mature, harshly, in the real world. Daisy fears this reality, and so she hopes that her daughter will, “be a fool-- that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (p.17). In The Great Gatsby, innocence protects them from the brutal reality. Nick and Gatsby journey through their disillusionments and innocences together. The moon through this all is shining a light on their reality and away from their illusions. In the end Nick saw,“ the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here” (p.180). Their fantasy didn't matter in the end and the moon melted away the, “inessential” parts of their lives to show that in the end dreams, hopes, and relationships were more important than the things they owned. Gatsby, a man who lives in a fantasy, teaches Nick to see the world with more hope and variety. Yet, at the same time Gatsby exposes Nick to a world of corruption and Nick wills Gatsby to wake up from his dreams and face the real world through their observations of one another.