When we think of Gatsby as a character, we would typically describe him as dedicated, cunning, and, more importantly, as a dreamer. This aspect of his character worked to his advantage in many situations, as shown when his dreams of being something more than a farmer led him to run away from his past life, and helped him gain his fortune. However, with some areas of his life, this proved to be a hindrance. While we all must be able to think creatively and think of new ideas, it is also important to know when to come down to earth. If Gatsby had learned his, he could have avoided his tragic fate. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses Gatsby’s love for Daisy to show that we need to focus on the present. The one of the first instances of this …show more content…
The first example of this is shown when Gatsby sent Daisy the letter before her wedding immediately. While it seems rational to send a letter to someone you love, there are a few reasons why Gatsby should have hesitated. First, it had been awhile since Daisy and Gatsby met. And, in addition to that, Gatsby had always assumed that Daisy would be his. Because Gatsby himself is a dreamer, it didn’t occur to him to see what was happening in Daisy’s life before sending her a letter. He had his future planned out, and wanted Daisy in it. Fitzgerald did this to, again, highlight Gatsby’s inability to be more grounded. The foil between Daisy and Gatsby is also brought out again. Although Daisy wanted Gatsby, and was devastated to get his letter, she married Tom anyways. Daisy realized that it was irrational to drop everything for Gatsby, something that Gatsby did not understand. Yet the true revealer of this theme is the overall difference in feelings between Gatsby and Daisy. As we talked about earlier, Gatsby’s flaw was that he was too caught up in the past. He saw Daisy, even several years later, as his one, true love. Daisy’s feelings can be identified with the line, “After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me up and said “What Gatsby?”… she described in the strangest of voices that it must be the man she used to know.” (pg. 83) Daisy saw Gatsby as someone she had a nice relationship with, but that it is in the past. Daisy realized that her life was with Tom and her daughter. Unlike Gatsby, she wasn’t willing to drop everything and leave that. Fitzgerald used this contrast to illustrate the importance of understanding one’s place. Daisy knew where she belonged, while Gatsby was too caught up in his dreams and past
Fitzgerald uses Gatsby to portray the personal failure in life in order to demonstrate how some people are dealt a worse hand in life than others. Gatsby, the protagonist of the story, is in love with a girl named Daisy, however she is married to a man named Tom. After a confrontation between Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Tom return home. Meanwhile, Gatsby hides in the bushes outside their house so he can make sure that Daisy is safe. Nick, the narrator of the novel, observes as Gatsby watches over Daisy “standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing” (Fitzgerald 145). As Gatsby waits outside Daisy’s house, he believes that she will choose him over Tom, but unfortunately he is in a hopeless situation and Daisy will break his heart. Nick further describes the dinner Tom and Daisy share to have “an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together” (Fitzgerald 145). While Gatsby stands there, he is unaware of Daisy’s betrayal as she shares an intimate dinner with Tom. Furthermore, as Gatsby fights for the love of his life, he is has no idea that the circumstances that are beyond his control since Daisy’s true love is Tom. As Tom and Daisy
Gatsby's tragic flaw lies within his inability to see that the real and the ideal cannot coexist. Gatsby's ideal is Daisy. He sees her as perfect and worthy of all his affections and praise. In reality she is undeserving and through her actions, proves she is pathetic rather than honorable. When Daisy says "Sophisticated-God I'm sophisticated" (18), she contradicts who she really is. The reader sees irony here, knowing she is far from sophisticated, but superficial, selfish and pathetic. Gatsby's vision is based on his belief that the past can be repeated, "can't repeat the past? Why of course you can" (111)! The disregard for reality is how Gatsby formulates his dream (with high expectations), and the belief that sufficient wealth can allow one to control his or her own fate. Gatsby believes youth and beauty can be recaptured if he can only make enough money. To become worthy of Daisy, Gatsby accumulates his wealth, so he can rewrite the past and Daisy will be his. He establishes an immense fortune to impress the great love of his life, Daisy, who can only be won with evidence of material success. Over the five years in which Gatsby formulates this ideal, he envisions Daisy so perfect that he places her on a pedestal. As he attempts to make his ideal a reality things do not run as smoothly as he plans. Daisy can never live up to Gatsby's ideal, though
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.
Gatsby is determined to win back the love of his life. He concludes that if he amasses a substantial wealth, he will be able to manipulate time, erasing Daisy’s marriage and fixing her future with him. Perhaps, this is why so many people are able to resonate with Gatsby, he invokes the sentiment of a common man. So many others have believed that if they simply change one aspect of their life and imagine it to be a particular way, the future will fall right into their hands.
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
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, portrays the life of a man who is truly focused on one dream: to reclaim the love of his life. Fitzgerald illustrates the problem of being so single-minded through Gatsby’s ultimate demise. His slow evolution and reveal of the character of Gatsby leads to a devastating climax once his dream fails. Fitzgerald uses extended metaphor and sharp diction to depict Gatsby’s crumbling life in his last moments.
Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald alludes to and questions many standard American beliefs. One of the most extreme cases that exemplifies his criticism is Gatsby’s fantastical description of what it would have been like to kiss Daisy when they had first known each other. “His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own,” Nick describes Gatsby’s vision, “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God” (Fitzgerald 110). Entrenched in Gatsby’s vast imagination is the idea that Daisy is flawless and the epitome of his goals. However irrational Gatsby’s mind is, he realizes that once he actually kissed her his idealistic version of her will disappear and he will realize her imperfections. This is is a perfect metaphor for Fitzgerald’s stance towards the American Dream, the unrealistic and heroic expectations of class mobility and the clean cut ideas about hard work and are, for the most part, theoretical. Fitzgerald realizes that in many cases, such as Gatsby’s, pining after an ideal yields nothing because of the impossibility of perfection. Fitzgerald ends the novel by attempting to describe the emptiness of the promise of the American Dream by writing, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”(Fitzgerald 180). The promise of success is endlessly beat down by the “current” that all people have to fight against. It is romantic and arguably foolish to attempt to break the odds and the safest and easiest route will always be to go backwards. The apparent futility of exerting effort is only counteracted by the existentiality of life, if there is no reason to try then why does life exist. Heroic ideas such as the American Dream are doomed to
Gatsby is the crucial character, his intentions are the plot of the novel,yearning for Daisy to love him.”He looked around him wildly,as if the past were here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”(Fitzgerald 116). With Fitzgerald use of metaphor and personification to convey how Gatsby is becoming intimate with
Every person thinks of dreams. They give every person the ability and free-reign of an imaginative world and they can focus on what the person wants to make him or herself happy. They are happy, until reality comes in and wipes many of those dreams away; which is the case for the character from Fitzgerald’s novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald shows the uncertainty Gatsby’s dream of receiving the love and affection from Daisy, through the use of allusions and symbolism throughout his novel. However, Fitzgerald’s explanation of Gatsby dream seems to contradict the novel as a whole because there are many moments where Gatsby is willing to throw away anything for the pursuit of an unrealistic dream.
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...and one fine morning” (Fitzgerald. 180). Gatsby chases many illusions such as Daisy that he ignored reality that late led to his death. Gatsby was a man
In the novel The Great Gatsby events from the past affect negatively the present in the character’s actions, attitudes, and their moral values. Throughout the story it is noticeable that Gatsby’s life ends up with a tragedy because he tries so hard to revive the past; however, that wish only brings him bad consequences. Although Daisy still loves Gatsby and even more than she loves Tom, that is not enough for him. What Gatsby wants is Daisy to love him just like when they were young and to admit that he is the only man she had ever loved in her life.
For a long time of his existence without Daisy, he constantly thinks of ways to become the man he thinks she deserves. Gatsby thought he had made that with his endless luxury belongings. He wanted her to give their love another chance. Gatsby’s dream is their relationship, this in which he needs to make reality. Depicting them as, “possessed by intense life,” implies that the focus is the present connection between them.
Gatsby does not belong to his own class and he is not accepted by the upper class, therefore he becomes an exception. Because of disappointment of being looked down upon and impossibility of accept by the upper class, he has nothing left except his love, which is also his “love dream”. Gatsby’s love for Daisy has been the sole drive and motive of his living. Gatsby’s great love is also the root of his great tragedy, because he is desperately in love with a woman who is not worthy of his deep love. Fitzgerald offers Gatsby with the spirit of sincerity, generosity, nobility, perseverance, and loyalty. All his good natures can be seen
When a person’s greatest hope does not come true, it can not only leave them stuck and unsure what to do with their lives, but cause emotional damage as well. Putting all the eggs in one basket means that if the person loses the basket, he or she loses everything they essentially live for as well. Obviously, this leaves him or her in the lowest depths of despair. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald once again uses the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy, this time to demonstrate how much hurt a broken dream can cause. Within the first hours of being reunited with his former love, Gatsby begins to suspect that the situation will not fall perfectly into place the way he imagined. Nick, after attending this awkward reunion, reflects, “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything... No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (103). Although Daisy still appears as beautiful and charming as ever, Gatsby’s false image of her after several lonely years expands so much larger than life that the real Daisy plainly disappoints Gatsby. Fitzgerald strongly warns against the pitfalls of hope - once a person fixates on an idea, such as Gatsby did, reality cannot compete with the power the idea has over the person, leading to a delusional and unsatisfactory life in actuality.