In chapter eight of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Gatsby's dead body is discovered. Fitzgerald foreshadows Gatsby's death almost to the point of be obvious. He states Gatsby's butler waited for a message long after there was anyone to give it to and that Nick disapproved of Gatsby from "beginning to end (Fitzgerald, 154). Statements like these strongly hint to Gatsby's death, but it was not until rereading the novel that I even picked up on them. These hints were woven so beautifully into the text that, while alluding to the future, they did little to spoil it for the reader. Fitzgerald uses beautiful figurative language in the chapter, even when describing Gatsby's death.
"A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen,fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees" (Fitzgerald, 161).
As Nick begins imagining Gatsby's final moments, Fitzgerald uses great symbolism. He writes of going into the new world, most likely symbolizing an afterlife. A place where the spirits have dreams like people here have air would have been a heaven for Gatsby, who was at his core a dreamer. The ashen figure, a slightly cliched symbolism for death, gliding toward Gatsby was the reader's final clue to his untimely end.
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