The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald uses a lot of symbolism in The Great Gatsby in order to express his themes.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past", can be interpretated as the whole meaning of the novel and as peoples unconcious need of the past. While we fight against the world and where it is taking us, its imposible to avoid the past and our memories. The message it provides is to look foward, contrary to what Gatsby does, which is to live in the past with fake memories, reason why he dies at the end.

Coming Through Slaugther

"While Webb is talking to Crawley, this is what Bolden sees:
The woman is cutting carrots. Each carrot is slit into 6 or 7 pieces. The knife slides through and hits the wood table they will eat off later. He is watching the coincidence of her fingers and the carrots. It began with the colour of the fingers and then the slight veins on the carrot magnified themselves to his eyes... As with all skills he watches for it to fail. If she thinks what she was doing she will loose control" (31)
From this quote we can infer that Bolden does not see the world as other people do. The last part of the paragrah, "If she thinks what she was doing she will loose control", describes, in my opinion, the whay Bolden and the other characters live. They do not realize the undignified whay they live, for example, making a list of prostitutes, or the neighborhood they live in.