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Dreams In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Decent Essays

When thinking back, most people remember being told to follow their dreams. Even so, these dreams aren’t always so great, and can turn into something corrupted. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, he shows just how someone’s dreams can be disturbed and warped into an obsession.
After Gatsby hosts a party which Nick and Daisy and Tom attend, Gatsby gets upset because he doesn’t think that Daisy liked what he had made of himself. He wants to live in the past, despite Nick’s warning against it. Nick reflects on this and what he thinks Gatsby was like. After that, he tells a story about Gatsby’s life 5 years ago, when he was walking with Daisy.
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to discover something, some idea …show more content…

In his flashback, Gatsby sees “a ladder” which is a symbol for his dream to climb up in society and become rich (110). He wants to be successful. And once he gets to the top he’ll find a "secret place above the trees" (110). This secret place is a symbol of him being high up, better than anyone else, and that’ll be the end goal of his dreams. And the “incomparable milk of wonder" is representative of being with Daisy and how how a woman uses milk to provide nourishment (110). For Gatsby, she strengthens his dreams, and believes that he has to accomplish his dream of being high status to be able to be with her and love her. But, it took a long time for him to be able to be with Daisy, and in the current moment in the novel he says Gatsby lost himself in “loving Daisy” (110). This word choice starts to show where Gatsby’s past dream was corrupted. He wanted to grow with himself, then have Daisy, but in the process he ended up losing sight of who he was. The word choice in Nick’s description of, “confused and disordered" shows what a mess Gatsby has become inside, despite all his success in getting money. He became obsessed in the idea of "return to a certain starting place" (110). This word choice is important, because he lost himself in getting his dream, and he’s desperate to going back to fix it. He put everything he had into growing socially and loving Daisy, this corrupted dream

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