Daisy's Ambition In The Great Gatsby

Zach Wood

Great Gatsby Final Paper

Due: 05/08/2023

Stuck in a Fantasy Throughout the novel, Gatsby’s goal is to get Daisy. He tries to achieve this dream in a flux of activeness. When we are first introduced to him, he is somewhat passive about his efforts on Daisy. He buys a house across the bay, hosts parties hoping she attends, and talks to Jordan Baker about her. He later steps up his confrontations with Daisy through Nick’s house visit from Daisy. Lastly he confronts both Tom and Daisy hoping she leaves him in the hotel. He is ultimately unsuccessful because she doesn’t love him enough to leave Tom. His main problem is the fact that he’s living in a fantasy world. He spends all this money on worldly possessions in hopes that Daisy will

This can be seen when he talks about her like she has a value. Fitzgerald makes an argument to not be trapped in a fantasy of your own and live your life for you. To be present in the world and appreciative and to see people for who they are and not what they are worth.

As seen through Nick’s point of view, Gatsby has been on a constant hunt to get Daisy, and tries to achieve this fruitless ambition in a slow progression, throughout the Novel. This starts with very passive actions, for example, when Jordan Baker is talking to Nick about Gatsby, and she says, “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy could be just across the bay” (Fitzgerald, 78). He does not directly search for attention from Daisy, but he wants to be somewhat present and feel connected. This feeling of connection also comes by his relation to the green light on Daisy and Tom’s dock. The next progression that Gatsby steps to is reintroducing himself to Daisy through both

The major factor in this is the fact that he is stuck in a fantest that he created in his head. He is too prideful and too connected to Daisy to give up the losing battle and it ultimately leads to him getting killed. The reader can see that he has been in a fantasy when Fitzgerald details, “A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifting fortuitously about . . . like the ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees” (161). This details the fact that he has finally woken up while living his last few minutes floating in his pool. This all goes to show that his living in a dream fundamentally got him killed. Another one of his many failures is seeing Daisy as a thing that has a value. We can see this when he describes her voice as, “full of money” (120). He sees her as wealthy and sees her lavish lifestyle, never knowing what having no money was like. This is something that plays into Gatsby’s fantasy and what drives him to buy many expensive things that he thinks she will like. He does not live his life for him, he lives for Daisy. A third failure is during his confrontation with Tom during the group meeting in the hotel. He is hoping and expecting for Daisy to drop Tom right there and then, but she could not bring herself to do it. He rejects Gatsby but he does not give up and keeps telling himself