What is the last word of The Great Gatsby?

The last word of The Great Gatsby is “past.” It appears in Nick Carraway’s closing sentence: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

That final image summarizes the novel’s central tension. Gatsby, Daisy, and the other characters pursue wealth, status, romance, and the promise of a fresh future, yet they remain trapped by memory and history. Gatsby believes he can recover his earlier relationship with Daisy and recreate the past, but the novel shows how powerfully earlier choices continue to shape the present.

The word is sometimes misremembered as “dream,” because dreams and aspiration dominate the book, or as “away,” because the characters repeatedly flee from places and responsibilities. Neither appears as the final word. The closing sentence also gives the novel its famous rhythm: forward motion is continually defeated by an opposing current. Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel therefore ends not with Gatsby’s dream fulfilled, but with a meditation on the difficulty of escaping the past.