How To Maintain Time In The Great Gatsby

Gatsby is a character that seems to be moving towards a bright future, where Daisy a girl who loved Gatsby will be in the picture again. Again, Gatsby can’t help what happened in the past, and wants the future to be only filled with the nostalgic feeling of the past. Gatsby’s dream is Daisy, but that dream is a sort of after image of what Daisy really is. Nick comments in chapter five how Gatsby’s view of Daisy was only a, “colossal vitality of his illusion.” Gatsby isn’t in love with Daisy in the present, nor is he in love with the thought of creating new memories with Daisy as they live together. Gatsby has created an illusion of what he expects Daisy to be like. Ironically, in the same chapter Gatsby begins to lean his head back and break Nick’s clock when he sees Daisy sitting their. Gatsby tries to fix the clock with his, “trembling fingers, and set it back in place.” This scene symbolizes how Gatsby is trying to go back in time, or in this case fix the time that he has missed with Daisy in order to achieve his dream of being with Daisy. This dream of trying to go back to the past isn’t new, the dream of returning to a simpler time where things aren't as complicated is common with people remembering the nostalgic

Before the world war had started, Gatsby was already in the period of time where he was courting Daisy. However after the war, Gatsby extends his period over time in order to obtain a socially acceptable rank in order to marry Daisy. It was during this period of extending time that Daisy fell under the pressure of her family to marry Tom Buchanan. When Gatsby returns to the United States, he realizes that he had lost Daisy and then proceeds to further increase his social status through bootlegging in the guise of drugstores. It is then during this period that Gatsby wants to erase the five years of time during which he was gone, from not only his life, but also Daisy’s. When Nick retorts to Gatsby’s idea, he exclaims to him “‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’”(Fitzgerald, 110). Near the end of the novel, Gatsby is invited along with Nick to the Buchanon’s for lunch, there, Gatsby sees Daisy and Tom’s child for the first time and Nick describes it as genuine surprise and that he believes that Gatsby “never believed in its existence before” (Fitzgerald, 117). The introduction of Daisy’s daughter

Themes of hope, success, and wealth overpower The Great Gatsby, leaving the reader with a new way to look at the roaring twenties, showing that not everything was good in this era. F. Scott Fitzgerald creates the characters in this book to live and recreate past memories and relationships. This was evident with Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship, Tom and Daisy’s struggling marriage, and Gatsby expecting so much of Daisy and wanting her to be the person she once was. The theme of this novel is to acknowledge the past, but do not recreate and live in the past because then you will not be living in the present, taking advantage of new opportunities.

Fitzgerald reveals the detrimental impacts of living in the past, through the character James Gatz and his numerous flashbacks responsible for Gatz’s development into the character of Jay Gatsby. Gatz invented the character of Gatsby, providing a fallacious back-story, in order to convince himself and hopefully Daisy that there remains a possibility of love despite their difference in economic backgrounds. Nick reveals, “So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this (Platonic) conception he was faithful to the end” (132). Gatsby changed his past, hoping to change the outcome of his future happiness. Fitzgerald reveals Gatsby’s construed misconception of himself through flashbacks in order to emphasize the effect the past has on the present.

Time is an idea described in diverse periods and aspects, for example philosophical, psychological, physical and biological. This time flows consistently but is broken into the past, present and future. Since we only live in the present forever in preparation for our futures and dreams, when we try to live in the past it restricts our future. Throughout F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, Gatsby wasted time and his life for a single dream, and it was his illusion of his idyllic future that made time a key dimension in his life. Fitzgerald sees life in satiric-tragic dimensions, as a contest between romantic illusion and coarse reality. The reality slowly and viciously disintegrates the illusion.

The novel The Great Gatsby is set in the 1920’s when people started to change the way that they looked at things. The narrator Nick Carraway tells the story as he was living in a small cottage beside Jay Gatsby’s mansion. Daisy Buchanan is a woman who does not think she should be able to do anything but be a fool for love. Last but least is Jay Gatsby a man who no one really knows but wish they knew. Gatsby was a man who always thought Daisy belonged to him but in reality she was never his to begin with.

As Gatsby reached out to the green light across the harbor, he mistakenly thought there was still hope of getting back into a relationship with a married woman, Daisy. He regretted his actions that occurred five years ago, and did everything in his power to regain Daisy’s respect. Gatsby used his wealth to summon Nick, Daisy’s cousin, under his “spell” as his first step to fulfill his path to the love of his life. Gatsby’s fixation to getting back with Daisy makes his judgment unclear since he cannot think distinctly. His craziness for her is seen at, “Yes,” he said after a moment, “but of course I’ll say I was” (Fitzgerald 143). At this scene, Gatsby takes the fall for what Daisy had done. When he does this, he was not thinking about the consequences that might follow which included the revenge of the dead woman’s husband. Gatsby was clearly not thinking straight because his obsession to be with Daisy overcame his intelligence. His dream of being with her slowly became into a nightmare. If he had not done some of his actions, he would not have been in this mess in the first place. If he had let go of her and let her be happy by marrying Tom, this whole situation would not have happened.

Gatsby creates an identity for himself as a wealthy man, who lives a glamorous life by throwing huge parties, and is known by the most prestigious figures in New York. What the partygoers don’t realize is that the parties and his wealth is all in the hopes of rekindling with his love from the past, Daisy. In the novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald tells the story of a young man named Jay Gatsby, who came from nothing, and built up to be everything that he had hoped and dreamed of being. However, his one dream did not become a reality due to misfortunate events. All the money in the world couldn’t make Gatsby happy, as he died as his true self, not the identity he created for himself.

Before Gatsby reconnects with Daisy after several years, it is pouring rain outside. The rain builds up suspense and Gatsby becomes nervous and eager. Then, it starts to decrease and he finally talks to Daisy. After they talk for a while and become comfortable with each other again, it stops raining and it’s bright outside. The stopping of the rain definitely

The desire and importance of time in The Great Gatsby is that time is the main focus of the novel. For instances gatsby is trying to pick things up where they were ended in the past. He buys a house across the bay that incidentally is across from daisy's home as well. As well as the extravagant parties that he throws in hopes of daisy showing up so they can meet again. As time progresses throughout the novel characters are being revealed. Fitzgerald focus on time as a way of life instead of an element. Time seems to be the way that the characters are built as well. For example Gatsby lives in the past, Daisy has moved on, and Nick comes to West Egg seeking a new start.

“The day agreed upon was pouring rain,” (p. 83) the day of Daisy’s and Gatsby’s reunion starts off with rain, during which the mood is very awkward and melancholy. After some time during Daisy’s exploration of Gatsby’s house, it begins to rain again, in which it represents change and replenishment as their love reawakens. “The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted…and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.” (p. 94) as a symbol of great change, rain effectively shows this, all during the times with Gatsby is with Daisy, even at times of stress. The rain brings on a new shade and symbolically addresses prosperity, not only sadness or tension, “Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

Fitzgerald uses the rainy weather in this novel to symbolize several things. For example, on the day that Gatsby plans to meet with Daisy, it is raining before they meet. “The day agreed upon was pouring rain. At eleven o’clock a man in a raincoat dragging a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass.” (Fitzgerald 88). In this situation, the rain represents an anxious and hopelessness mood. When Gatsby arrived at Nick’s house, he begins to doubt

Another symbol in The Great Gatsby is time. This becomes evident as time harasses Gatsby throughout the novel. “The clock ticked on the washstand while Gatsby spun his gaudy, youthful dreams of the future. Significantly, even then, his memory is punctuated by sounds of time and “ticking”, and, at Gatsby and Daisy’s first meeting after five years, in Gatsby’s embarrassment he almost smashes the defunct mantelpiece clock”. Gatsby tries desperately throughout the story to recapture the past to win Daisy back. The people who attended Gatsby’s parties were written on a timetable. Throughout the story, Gatsby seems obsessed with a better time, a past, he wants to reclaim.

In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby’s repeated interactions with the elements of time represents his nebulous view of the passage of time. Gatsby’s first interaction with a literal symbol of time is when he is awkwardly standing against the mantle in Nick’s home. He leans back and then “... the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers…” (Fitzgerald 91). The clock represents time more specifically the passage of time that Gatsby is utterly unaware of because of how absorbed in the idea of how Daisy was when he first met her.

The big question of the day is, can your turn back time? Well in the essay we are going to figure that question out. I strongly support Gatsby's theory in the book but I also agree with some of the things Nick says. You can change yourself, change things the way they once were, but you can never change what happened.