The Shattering of the Kaleidoscope: the Simultaneous Power and Danger of Illusion in TheGreat Gatsby and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”

Cause I’m in love with my future, can’t wait to meet her –Billie Eilish, “My Future”

From hip Gen Z music artists like Billie Eilish to reclusive millionaires like Gatsby and even elderly women on their deathbeds like Granny Weatherall, everyone is in love with their future. The idea of more and better as time passes captivates all facets of society at some point, for better or for worse. But what happens when you discover the future is not all that you thought it would be when you finally get there? What then? In both The Great Gatsby and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” illusion and hope for the future function as both a powerful motivator through their creation of possibility and a dangerous trap when proven false by looking into the past. Through the motif of light, both stories reveal how illusions proven to be myths by time lead to existential unraveling and loss of faith.

In both “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and The Great Gatsby, illusion serves as a powerful yet deceptive form of motivation, pushing the characters to pursue idealized visions of life that often surpass reality. Even on her death bead, Granny Weatherall is motivated and soothed by the possibility of making even more of her future: ”Tomorrow was far away and there was nothing to trouble about. Things were finished somehow when the time came; thank God there was always a little margin over peace: then a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly” (1255). Granny knowing that the possibility of tomorrow exists with more time and opportunity to round off the corners of her life is enough to keep her going and put her at ease, even if the promise of tomorrow is an empty one. Despite the fact that more time in life has never been a guarantee for her or anyone, this hope brought by the illusion of everlasting possibility in the future allows her to push forward in her existence and keep taking the next step to maybe make all her goals for tomorrow a reality. However, making strides in Granny’s life through illusion leads to her motivations being fogged by this facade: ”all you made melted and changed and slipped under your hands, so that by the time you finished you almost forgot what you were working for” (1257). While this illusion may be a motivator, it is still intangible. If one is working towards a goal whose reality is morphed by perception, through the process of attaining it, one may forget what exactly that aspiration was without its gilded illusion. It seems Granny Weatherall finally identifies this phenomenon when her tomorrows run out, when her illusion finally breaks down like a broken kaleidoscope, revealing the truth of her mundane existence underneath, void of leftover possibility. This same clashing of illusion with reality occurs when Gatsby finally reunites with Daisy Buchanan after five years of obsessing over the idea of her, leading to “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” (95). Just like Granny’s loss of hope for tomorrow, Even though Gatsby has what he has been working towards for five years, it just does not measure up to the idea of Daisy that has kept him going: an idea seemingly of a woman so extraordinary she is inhuman. This disconnect between Gatsby’s dream and Daisy’s reality exposes the hollowness at the core of his motivation. The “colossal vitality” of his illusion sustained him, just as Granny’s belief in the endless promise of tomorrow soothed her in her final moments. Yet, when fantasy ultimately collides with reality, both characters are left disoriented and confused. Gatsby’s vision of Daisy, like Granny’s vision of a neatly finished life, was never truly attainable because it existed only in a realm of illusion.

Once reality and the illusion of the future finally crash into each other, it can easily lead to fixation on the past to try and make the lost illusion a reality. However, this obsessive attachment to the past can become a destructive force when it consumes one's present, as it does to Gatsby. Once Gatsby finally attains his goal of rekindling his relationship with Daisy, his focus shifts to changing the set-in-stone past through repetition: ”’Can’t repeat the past?’ He cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’” (110). Gatsby may have gotten what he wanted, but he is still unsatisfied with his unfulfilled illusion. This may be his motivation to try and reshape the past. While he may not have the same control over how the past is perceived in his mind as he does in the future, repeating the past gives him this power of illusion back. However, this need for control of both the future and past only worsens his present with Daisy: “‘Oh, you want too much!’ She cried to Gatsby. ‘I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s

past’” (132). Daisy’s criticism of Gatsby reveals his fundamental flaw: he refuses to accept reality as it is. While this hunger for better may have served him well in the past, now that he has gotten all that he hungered for, the girl and the wealth, he cannot be satisfied due to the impossibility of his desires. Daisy offers Gatsby love in the present, but Gatsby’s obsession

demands more than what is possible; he wants a complete erasure and rewriting of time. Unlike Gatsby, Daisy understands that the past is immovable and no amount of desire or illusion can change it. Gatsby’s insistence on total control over both the future and the past alienates him

from the present moment, ultimately sabotaging the very relationship he fought so hard to reclaim. In trying to possess an idealized version of Daisy and their shared history, he loses grip on the real Daisy and the love she is able to give him now. Gatsby may trip into the pitfalls of dwelling on the past, but Granny Weatherall claims that she is not making the same mistake.

Granny says she actively tries to push away an encroaching obsession with the past, specifically with her old love affairs: “’For sixty years she had prayed against remembering him and against losing her soul in the deep pit of hell” (1257). Somehow, Granny Weatherall seems to know of the dangers held by reflecting too deeply on the past, seemingly parallel to the “deep pit of hell,” which is why she takes every measure to avoid thinking about it, yet she still frequently dwells on the past throughout the story. These conflicting claims may be due to Granny narrating her own story. Her resistance to the past seems to just be a lie she tells herself, exhibited by her frequent reflection on people and events in her life like Hapsy, her daughter, and past lovers. This may be why Gatspy’s failure to push away the past is much clearer than Granny’s; Gatsby’s story is not narrated by himself but rather by Nick, an innocent bystander looking in on Gatsby’s lavish and messy life, while Granny’s story is narrated in a stream of consciousness style. While Granny naturally lies to herself about her relationship with the past, often confusing the reader with her inconsistent claims, Nick shines a light on the truth of Gatsby’s treatment of time, revealing the inescapable reality that Granny covers up through her lies to herself, compounding illusion over illusion. While both characters are shaped by their illusions and tangled relationships with time, it is the contrast between internal self-deception and external observation that reveals the depth of their illusions; Granny is hidden beneath layers of denial, and the prying eyes of an outsider expose Gatsby.

In both “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and The Great Gatsby, this pattern of illusion and subsequent loss of faith and hope culminates in the light motif. Right before Granny Weatherall dies, she realizes she has run out of tomorrows: “So, my dear Lord, this is my death and I wasn’t even thinking about it. My children have come to see me die. But I can’t, it’s not

time...Oh, my dear Lord, do wait a minute” (1260). Her incoming death finally shatters the illusion of everlasting time, with her mortality finally catching up to her. She makes a religious plea for more time, but she is simply too late. As death abruptly arrives, she is forced to confront the ultimate truth that time is not hers to command. Her illusion of endless tomorrows dissolves into a painful recognition that not only is her life incomplete, but her imagined closure will never come, causing her to lose faith in possibility. The light beside her bed symbolizes this loss of faith: ”she stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light” (1260). Traditionally, through a religious lens, death is often described as one going into the light, but not for Granny, even though she makes several pleas to a higher power throughout the story. Instead, her death is defined by her actively extinguishing light. Instead of her going towards God in the afterlife or by going towards light, the death of her illusion is what ultimately kills her, symbolized in the extinguishing of her light of faith for endless possibility. This light doesn’t just put out itself; Granny actively blows out her light of hope. Now that she has confronted the lies of her

illusions, which kept her going throughout her life, what more is there to live for? Once she loses that powerful facade of possibility, she knows it is her time to let go of the light in death instead of going toward it. Gatsby has a similar relationship to light throughout his endeavors with

illusion and possibility: “the colossal significance of the green light had now vanished forever...Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one” (93) Gatsby may have gotten Daisy, but he lost the fantasy he had of her when he glanced across the bay to see her glittering green light of possibility now made dim by

truth. When time proves that Gatsby’s illusions are not all that they added up to in his mind, a lowering of light symbolizes this shattering of illusion, just like the candle does for Granny. Still, F. Scott Fitzgerald wants the significance of the great light to stick with the reader, shown by the

: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning—-“ (180). Repeatedly throughout Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy, his illusion is

challenged and proven faulty, leading to his mental unraveling. Yet, it seems Fitzgerald views the illusion of the future as a somewhat necessary part of life, exhibited by his ending the book with this quote. It seems Fitzgerald believes that even though faith in the light of possibility is

ultimately destructive, it is a necessary cycle that makes humanity “run faster” and “stretch out our arms farther,” even if we do not quite understand what we are reaching for. Granny Weatherall’s extinguished candle and Gatsby’s dimmed green light symbolize disillusionment

and loss of faith. Yet, while Granny’s story ends in surrender to truth, Fitzgerald leaves readers with a contrasting message: that the very illusions which ultimately betray us are also what drives us to strive, to hope, and to live a little larger.

The Great Gatsby and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” reveal the double-edged sword of the nature of illusion and hope: it propels characters forward with purpose yet leaves them shattered when reality falls short. Through the shared motif of light, both stories emphasize how

the human desire for a better tomorrow can both sustain and destroy. Granny Weatherall clings to the illusion of more time until the very end, only to find herself unprepared for death when it arrives on her doorstep, and Gatsby chases an idealized love and a rewritten past, only to realize the green light he whole-heartedly believed in only shined so bright in his head. Now, around 100 years after these stories were written, the belief that the world is going down the wrong path or is beyond comparison is growing, often known as “apocalyptic doom” or “end-times thinking.” Political turmoil, global warming, and general social unrest seem to be compounding in a dangerous stew of pessimism in the eyes of many, which is naturally an understandable reaction. Still, even if the illusion of the future may prove faulty in the end, sometimes it is necessary to lie to give yourself a reason to stand up and keep going, as exhibited by Granny Weatherall’s endless tomorrows and Gatsby’s idea of Daisy. So, no, the goal of a perfect world is probably never going to become a reality, but it is not a crime to use the idea of utopia to motivate yourself to get one step closer to that goal instead of letting pessimism consume you.

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, and Jesmyn Ward. The Great Gatsby. Edited by James L. W. West, Scribner,

2018.

Porter, Katherine Anne, Mrs. The Jilting of Granny Weatherall. 1930.