How To Obtain Happiness In The Great Gatsby

Jay Gatsby is an enormously rich man, and in the flashy years of the jazz age, wealth defined importance. Gatsby has endless wealth, power and influence but never uses material objects selfishly. Everything he owns exists only to attain his vision. Nick feels

Jay Gatsby, the title character of the novel is an incredibly wealthy young man, living in a medieval mansion in West Egg on an imaginary area of Long Island. Gatsby has many laudable traits. For example, he is filled with optimism and the ability to transform his dreams into reality. Jay is also extremely faithful to his true love, Daisy Buchanan, even to the point of death. When we first meet Gatsby, he is the aloof host of the fantastically opulent parties thrown every weekend at his mansion. It appears he is surrounded by wondrous luxury and is courted by beautiful women and the rich and powerful men of the time. Jay is also a very admirable character due to his status of wealth and being a hero of War World I, “In the Argonne Forest I took two machine gun detachments so far forward that there was half a mile gap on either side… I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration- even Montenegro”. However, Nick who narrates the book views Gatsby as a flawed man who is dishonest, deceitful, a liar, and a dreamer whom is searching for answers in the past, “he talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself, perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy… if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was…”

“feeling of pleasure or contentment” is what happy is defined. Throughout the book “The Great Gatsby” it is focused heavily on the characters' happiness and what they want for their life. I focus on Myrtle Wilson, who seems to just be some mistress who is a bad person because a man is cheating on his wife for her. Myrtle is more than just some mistress, she wants happiness, she wants what she can't have with her husband. Myrtle wants money she thinks that will make her happy, and that could be what truly makes her happy or it will give her the false happiness that she wants. This relates to Maslow's Hierarchy of needs because she's not getting what she needs in her eyes; she wants more than what her husband is giving her and she can get that with Tom.

In the song “Can’t Buy Me Love” written by the Beatles, they claim that they can buy anything there friend desires but it sure can not buy them love (Genius, 1964). In the story, Fitzgerald shows us many examples of Jay Gatsby’s way of living in having a lot of money and he constantly tries to use that money to win Daisy away from Tom, her husband. Just like in the song Gatsby does not achieve the love of his old friend Daisy with money. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” a wealthy man, Gatsby makes strong efforts to win back the heart of his lover, Daisy Buchanan. F. Scott Fitzgerald also demonstrates through the characters of “The Great Gatsby” that money cannot buy one's happiness.

The Great Gatsby is a story is about a man named Jay Gatsby who revalves his life around getting his one true love back, Daisy. Gatsby lived an eventful life by going from poverty to wealth and then eventually to death. This story is based on the thought of the American dream that hard work can lead you from rags to riches especially when you have something to work for. Throughout the story to prove this it is demonstrated by the use of foreshadowing, flashback, similes, and metaphors. All these played a role in developing the story along with making things interesting.

What makes people happy in most countries is when they gain more wealth. These values are still true today and as true in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which is held in the 1920’s. Most Americans think that wealth and happiness are synonymous with each other. This belief will continue to fuel an economy and marketplace that persuades consumers into buying products that will provide them “happiness”. Wealth and human happiness have reached an equilibrium in the view of an enormously capitalistic society, contrary to the beliefs of social progressives who believe happiness comes from the heart. Gatsby’s generation of the 20's were the age of a market that was primarily fueled off of the neediness of the average consumer. The same values are present today because our need for flashy products stem from the free market economy in this country. Consumers believe that they need all the things that businesses are attempting to sell to them.

Early in the book, the character Jay Gatsby, is introduced as a dreamer who is gracious, charming, and a bit mysterious. As the novel progresses we also learn that Gatsby is a self-made man who achieved the American Dream of rising up from the lower classes to the top of society. But to Gatsby, the desire for Daisy and love proves more powerful than money. Something that shows his obsession of her, is this example.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby provides the reader with a unique outlook on the life of the newly rich. Gatsby is an enigma and a subject of great curiosity, furthermore, he is content with a lot in life until he strives too hard. His obsession with wealth, his lonely life and his delusion allow the reader to sympathize with him.

The American Dream: Is is fact or fiction? In the United States’ Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers set forth the idea of an American Dream by providing us with the recognizable phrase “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. The green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock symbolizes Jay Gatsby’s “Pursuit of Happiness” in the novel, The Great Gatsby, set in the 1920s on Long Island, New York. The American Dream can be defined as “the belief that anyone, regardless of where they were born or what class they were born into, can attain their own version of success in a society where upward mobility is possible for everyone. The American Dream is achieved through sacrifice, risk-taking, and hard work, not by chance” (Fontinelle, Amy). At the birth of our country in 1776, our founding fathers introduced the American Dream as a personal desire to pursue happiness; however, the pursuit of happiness was not intended to promote self-indulgence, rather to act as a catalyst to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit. As our country has changed, the idea of the American Dream, in some cases, has evolved into the pursuit of one’s own indulgences such as material gain regardless of the consequences.

Jay Gatsby was greedy,a con-artist, desperate, and lonely. He was also smart, dedicated, and hopeful. There were so many aspects to his personality, he wasn't simply just one thing. He was using people, manipulating them, taking what he could get, but he was doing it for

The transformation between James Gatz and Jay Gatsby is an example of how people can transform themselves according to their ambition for wealth and prosperity. The use of illegal activities to gain Gatsby's wealth is alluded to in the book, this shows the extent of how the American Dream circumvented the moral revulsion and pushed people who were crazy about money into crime - driving the moral standing of wealthier citizens into the ground. To Gatsby, his dream was symbolised by Daisy, Gatsby even says that her voice sounds like money, a direct correlation between Daisy and the wealth and happiness that Gatsby would supposedly enjoy if only he could have married Daisy but could still enjoy if he had married her five years later. His pursuit of happiness with Daisy was the ultimate cause of the degradation of Gatsby's morals and realistic dreams. This is because he held an unrealistic view of life and how he could recreate the past. His dreams had distorted reality to the point where when his rationality realised that the image of life and of Daisy did not coincide with the real life version his mind did not grasp that perhaps the dream had receded to the point of no return, consequently his dreams helped to

In today’s world, everyone wants to be happy. People will do whatever it takes to get happiness even if it means putting themselves first, which is not in other people’s favor. Characters of The Great Gatsby seem to not to be able to have true happiness but have temporary fixes to give themselves self-satisfaction at the least. Since the characters are not happy with their current lives, they have affairs. This is what makes them feel like they’ve achieved prosperity. Gatsby and Daisy’s love affair’s is founded on their love for each other while Tom and Myrtle’s affair is based off the two wanting social status.

In the 1920s, it turned into the obtaining of material things. That was best exemplified by the novel The Great Gatsby. Its creator, F. Scott Fitzgerald, characterized the desires of the age. In the meantime, he cautioned that a quest for joy driven by eagerness was not achievable. That is on the grounds that another person dependably had more. This ravenousness prompted the share trading system crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

He is young and wealthy, but his success comes from his dishonesty and deceptiveness. Jay Gatsby is not really great, he is wealthy but morally corrupt. Gatsby is incredibly wealthy but no one knows where he got his money from. Gatsby is chasing the american dream which is a self-made, wealthy and happy man.

Time tells us that success often comes with a price. Often money will create more problems than it can solve. The richness of a person’s soul can be hidden in the folds of money. Such is the case of Jay Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is constantly altering in the readers mind due to the various puzzling events that transpire in the novel creating a level of mystery.