Daisy's Infatuation In The Great Gatsby

What did you always dream of becoming as a child? An astronaut? A doctor? The President? Many people tend to lose sight of their old dreams and accept a much harsher reality, yet not in the case of Jay Gatsby, the mysterious and extremely wealthy protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Set in the 1920s in Long Island, Gatsby embodies the culture of the Jazz Age as he uses his riches in pursuit of his former love, Daisy Buchanan, a beautiful woman from an affluent family. Daisy symbolizes the temptation and disillusionment of dreams as Gatsby’s interactions with her bring to light the true nature of their relationship, and he is forced to see that his initial expectations for their love are unattainable.

Jay Gatsby’s infatuation

Tom, Daisy’s immensely rich husband, gets into an argument with Gatsby that helps reveal to Gatsby that he has been perpetuating a juvenile delusion by blindly pursuing Daisy. In the middle of the heated conversation Daisy admits, “‘Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom’”(Fitzgerald 133). At this point in the The Great Gatsby, the futility of Gatsby’s dreams becomes blatantly apparent. Gatsby has always considered Daisy as worthy of his endless devotion and chooses to see past her flaws. Over time Gatsby’s dream becomes more about the idea of Daisy and being in love rather than Daisy as she actually is. In reality Daisy is a selfish and materialistic person who will always choose the comfort of money and prestige over love. Gatsby starts to realize that the otherworldly qualities he has come to associate with Daisy simply aren’t

The temptation of wealth and love drives him to chase unrealistic and misguided dreams: “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night” (Fitzgerald 180). The more Gatsby tries to recapture his past, the further he is taken away from what is real. Throughout The Great Gatsby he moves further into this dreamland he has created of his perfect life with Daisy, trying to escape the social class he was born to that once separated them. There is also irony in that Gatsby continuously tries to distance himself from his past and the lower class lifestyle, yet he spends the entirety of his life trying to rewrite his past with Daisy until he sees that she isn’t someone truly worth his love. Jay Gatsby spends his entire life pursuing a dream because of his love for Daisy Buchanan, unable to see reality. Daisy symbolizes how dreams can tempt people and blind them from the truth. Dreams often fail to live up to your expectations. Gatsby’s unfortunate demise and relationship with Daisy show that you cannot pursue dreams for the future if they are grounded in the