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The Great Gatsby Really Great Analysis

Decent Essays

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word “great” is defined as: “markedly superior in character or quality.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, there as an immediate expectation that the titular character, Gatsby, is “great.” Upon first look, Gatsby appears to meet this expectation. Gatsby has a “factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy” for a house, a countless amount of cars, a seemingly endless amount of money, and a hydroplane. But upon closer review, Gatsby reveals his true character. Although he accumulated a “great” fortune, Gatsby himself was not “great” because of his illegal rise to wealth, pathetic obsession with an already married woman, and lack of true friends, displaying that money does not equate to success. Gatsby’s illegitimate accumulation of wealth makes him not great. With the opulent opulent parties Gatsby throws, there are many rumors among …show more content…

Before Gatsby left to fight in World War I, he and Daisy had a “month of love” (150) while he trained in Louisville. For five years after that summer love, Gatsby remained obsessed with Daisy: Gatsby read “a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy's name” (xx), and bought his house so that “Daisy would be just across the bay” (xx). This pathetic stalking is made even more deplorable because Gatsby knew that Daisy was married and yet he is still obsessed with her. What’s made even worse is that Gatsby finally gets the courage to reconnect with her, but with the intention to “fix everything just the way it was before" (XX). These ethical wrongdoing goes even one step further when Gatsby has the audacity to go to dinner with Daisy and her husband, Tom, and then pressures Daisy to tell Tom “the truth–that [she] never loved him” (XX). Pearson believes that Gatsby’s “blatant wooing of another man’s wife” (642) is incredibly hedonistic and

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