Psychoanalytic theory and The Great Gatsby

The last sentence of The Great Gatsby is “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” From a psychoanalytical standpoint, this sentence forces us to look at the unconscious desires of the characters and their repression of psychological pain.
The image is appropriate because of Gatsby’s effort to reach the green light, which represents Daisy, from across the water. He expends all of his energy in search of a goal that is always moving away, as the current draws him back no matter how hard he rows, as Tom keeps taking Daisy away no matter how close he gets. He tries to transform his dreams into reality but like everybody else, he is the sum of his past experiences.
Tyson talks in the textbook about wearing a new set of glasses through which to see a literary work. Psychoanalytic criticism is a way to focus on the unconscious desires and drives of the characters. If we look at the novel this way, we can see how Gatsby has repressed his past. He has continually during his life expunged from his consciousness those unhappy moments of his life. As the theory suggests, repression may hide those unhappy moments, but it does not erase them. In fact, this repression drives the individual to replay those events until fixed or finished in some way that closes the issue or reworks it into the individual’s favor. This fixing never happens though; it is our unconscious desire to fix things.
Gatsby lost Daisy once. Something got in the way of them being together. Tom took her away. Gatsby focused all of his energy towards re-attaining her, thinking that he can pick up exactly where he left off. Almost there once more, the past rears its ugly head, and Tom takes her away again.
Without psychoanalytical criticism, we could not understand how the repression of Gatsby’s unhappy moments of life actually drives his character. The green light and Daisy are one and the same, and appropriately, across the same body of water. As Gatsby tries to reach her, the current is drawing him back into the past. This is repression, the fact that Gatsby cannot move forward without his past guiding him.