Jay Gatsby Past

Gatsby cannot accept the truth that Daisy has married somebody else, and he wants to go back to the time when Daisy and he were together. Gatsby cannot move on with his life. Through knowing about Gatsby's past and how he escapes from it, Nick learns that one must live in the present and that the attempt to get back to the past is futile, hopeless, and impossible.

Gatsby has many issues of repeating his past instead of living in the present. A common

When Gatsby reveals to about his relationship with Daisy, Nick’s relationship with Gatsby takes a full u-turn as it rapidly advances their association from simple acquaintances to close friends. Nick’s outlook of Gatsby undergoes a similar transformation. When Nick learns of the previous relationship between Gatsby and Daisy, Gatsby’s actions make sense to Nick. The mansion, the extravagant parties, and the green light were all in the efforts for making Daisy notice him. Gatsby lives his life for the past life that he lived. He spends his life seeking the attention of his love, Daisy, and as Nick explains, “He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was…” (Fitzgerald 110). Gatsby sought out the American dream in order to win over the love of Daisy which creates a different perception of himself to Nick. Nick, now knowing Gatsby’s intentions worries about Gatsby’s possible rejection, and then warns him that, “[he] wouldn’t ask too much of her, you can’t repeat the past.” (Fitzgerald 110) But Gatsby, blinded by love, strives to win Nick’s married cousin’s heart. Nick perceives Gatsby as a man dwelling on the past

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.

62) Gatsby even asked Nick for his help to put him and Daisy in the same room together earlier in the novel. Nick agrees and eventually an affair ensues between Gatsby and married Daisy. This alone depicts exactly what Nick means when he speaks about how close Gatsby was to his dream and how it was almost impossible for him not to achieve it. He somewhat has won Daisy over by throwing his wealth in her face every chance he had. However, Daisy was already used to the lifestyle that Gatsby just newly acquired. This realization speaks through the next portion of the passage. “He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city” (pg. 180). His dream of winning Daisy back is trapped in the past because she is now married to Tom. Gatsby fails to accept the fact that times change and so do people. Daisy was not the same person he knew all those years ago. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything” (pg. 22). Living lavishly was not new for Daisy like it was for Daisy. She had traveled the world and done everything she wanted to do so nothing really excited her anymore. Despite her love for Gatsby, Daisy decides to stay with tom when Gatsby demands she tell her husband she never loved him. Her decision shows that Gatsby’s dream of winning Daisy’s love back was indeed in the past. The icing is put on the cake when Tom exposes Gatsby for

When someone comes off too eager for something they desire, sometimes the satisfaction won’t meet the expectations they primarily had. The thrill to chase that dream has vanished and has now turned into a bland, dull thought. Gatsby’s memory of Daisy had changed and then builds her up to more than she actually is. He then proceeds to market Daisy as something completely different. The tendency for Gatsby trying to lie to himself about his memory of Daisy has faded and is now trying hopelessly to revive his past feelings about Daisy. “He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity”(Fitzgerald 92). The cumbersome attitude of Gatsby towards

In the time that I have grown close to him, I have learned many things, but the most important thing that I have learned is to never give up. Gatsby had recently rekindled his relationship with a former love that he had been pursuing for five years. He had fallen in love with the idea of getting his woman back, and this provided Gatsby with motivation throughout the war and other troubling times. In addition to motivation, this relationship gave him purpose. I observed this once in a casual conversation about him, “Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor” (78). Gatsby loved this woman and eventually, his protective and loving nature over her is what got him killed. Anyhow, enough of this, let us now begin to focus on the early stages of Gatsby’s life. He

When it came to Gatsby, he was interested in Nick’s simplicity but he was also intrigued at Nick’s relation to Daisy, his long-lost lover. In the novel it states, “had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.” (Fitzgerald, 97). This quote shows how Gatsby had reconnected with Daisy through Nick and how Nick admired Gatsby’s passion when he finally meet up with Daisy once again. Lastly, the tragic death of Gatsby opens up a new realm of things for Nick. In the novel, it states, “After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction.” (Fitzgerald, 176). He now reflected on how Gatsby’s passion and drive to live allowed Nick to view life in the real world differently. Nick, who was directly inspired by Gatsby, now was left confused as he wanted to learn all that one needs for success, though the death made it impossible. The last page of the novel, it ends with, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arm farther.” (Fitzgerald, 180). This quote shows how much of a deep impact Gatsby’s death had on Nick. Now

Gatsby’s claim to love Daisy is nothing more than wanting to complete his collection of the grand prize being a trophy wife. It became apparent to Nick that Gatsby wanted to repeat the past in order to win the award of a perfect woman. While reminiscing, Nick realizes Gatsby’s desire was that, “He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’ After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house- just as if it were five years ago” (Fitzgerald 109). Gatsby’s relentless need to ‘get the girl’ blinds his ability to comprehend Daisy’s feelings of the situation. His want to shatter the Buchanan’s marriage

While most people chase love, few know that it is foolish. One should not chase after love, but allow it to find them naturally. Obviously, Gatsby was none the wiser about that bit of advice. In the story, we see Gatsby chase after his supposedly long lost love, but is she truly his love? With how little time they spent together, how much they’ve grown throughout the years, and all that has happened in both of their lives, does Gatsby truly love Daisy, a married mother of one? Their star-crossed story is the perfect example of a hold on the past destroying a future. This essay will explore their strange and twisted romance while supporting one simple fact. Jay Gatsby was not in love with Daisy.

Throughout the novel, the protagonist of the story, Jay Gatsby, is essentially an innocent victim (romantic idealist) who is destroyed by his inability to accept reality. All throughout the story it is clearly shown to us how much Jay Gatsby is in love with a girl he once knew, Daisy Buchanan. He is constantly doing everything he can to try to win her back. He is always trying to relive this past relationship with her no matter what it takes. When Gatsby is talking to the narrator, Nick Carraway, Nick tells him he can’t revolve his life around what happened in the past.

Gatsby’s life after the war is his search for his American Dream, which, in his eyes, culminates in Daisy. Nick observes that Gatsby “found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149). Fitzgerald chooses to compare Gatsby’s

Jay Gatsby is a man with many dynamic qualities that are illustrated through his close ties to his past desires. Within the masterfully crafted Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the past to play a major role in Gatsby’s disillusionment. While the book only highlights a sliver of Gatsby’s life, Fitzgerald’s stunning writing allows the reader to recognize the crucial relationship between the protagonist and his past through his pining for Daisy, materialistic values and his desire to achieve the American dream. Gatsby’s infatuation with Daisy Buchanan is greatly altered by past events, as seen repeatedly throughout the novel. Fitzgerald uses a scene five years previous to the story to illustrate the beginnings of Gatsby’s obsession.

Reader Response to The Great Gatsby The past is full of feelings, emotions and events—however, these are just as their label suggests: passed. Jay Gatsby wants nothing more than to have the love he lost with Daisy Buchanan, but he does not realize that their time apart and the things that have happened to her since their parting prevent him from doing this. The past can affect the future, but only if it is held onto and remembered.

In these last three paragraphs, the narrator Nick Carraway realizes how close Jay Gatsby was to reaching his dreams in winning back the love of his life, Daisy. Stating the reason he did not achieve his dream was because Gatsby was trying to relive his past. When he left Daisy to go to war, he left a charming, sophisticated beautiful young women. When he came back, he believed he could pick up from where they ended, and failed to accept that people change over time and Daisy was not the person he remembered her to be and continued to think of her as when they first meet. He was in love with someone who no longer existed.