Zora Neale Hurston Responds to The Great Gatsby?

I always wonder about a theory that one of my professors at Oakland University had about the last sentence of The Great Gatsby being riffed on in the opening paragraph of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

It seems like a long shot. The Great Gatsby didn’t become popular until after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death. During World War II the book was distributed to soldiers during the war effort and became very popular from that point on. It is possible that Hurston may have obtained a copy, but to my knowledge there is no proof of that. So we are left to speculate. Here are the two passages. I’ll even put in a little extra to give it more context.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

            And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning---

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail on forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

            Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. They act and do things accordingly.

Intentional or not these texts seem to be speaking to each other. The last sentence in Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” is immediately addressed in Hurston’s novel in italics: "Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide." It is incredible to me how Hurston’s novel immediately picks up where Gatsby left off. Or, maybe it was some kind of weird random great American novel synchronicity. Either way for educators the two books are great together in a classroom.