Essay On The Great Gatsby

In “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald suggests that individuals often avoid dealing with the uncertainties of the past by losing themselves in nostalgia and attempting to recreate and reshape the past. At its core, “The Great Gatsby” is about the lengths an individual is willing to go to to avoid dealing with the pain and heartache caused by the ending of a relationship. F. Scott Fitzgerald effectively uses the character of Nick Carraway to highlight the absurdity of Jay Gatsby’s actions and goals. By using a different character to narrate the story, Gatsby’s actions are seen as unhinged because the readers do not fully understand the reasoning behind them. In trying to cope with the uncertainties of the past, the protagonist, Jay Gatsby,

Since then, Gatsby has become a successful and wealthy individual who is obsessed with rekindling a lost love. Because of this obsession, to the general public, Gatsby is considered a mysterious and enigmatic individual, who very few people know. Moreover, due to the reasoning behind their inability to make their relationship work, to Gatsby, Daisy also represents wealth, social status, and happiness. In trying to recreate his past relationship with Daisy, he is also trying to rewrite history by creating a relationship in which he is wealthy and respected by society. In trying to attain these things, he inadvertently closes himself off from any genuine human connection. Gatsby becomes so engrossed in his nostalgia that he refuses to move on from the relationship. Whenever confronted with the possibility that he will not be able to recreate the past, he refuses to acknowledge it, going so far as to say, “[He’s] going to fix everything just the way it was.” (Fitzgerald, p. 133) Instead of trying to cope with the ending of his past relationship in a healthy manner, his dwelling in nostalgia leads him to desperately try and recreate

Gatsby disregards Daisy’s marriage to Tom on multiple occasions, leading Nick to assume that he “wanted nothing less of Daisy” (Fitzgerald, p. 132) than to hear her tell Tom, “I never loved you.” Gatsby’s outright dismissal of Daisy’s feelings for Tom is an idea that is reinforced throughout the novel. His dismissal of the relationship between Tom and Daisy stems from the romanticized version of her he has created and obsessed over for years. His refusal to acknowledge the reality of their marriage is a result of him being so infatuated with the idea of Daisy and the memories of their relationship that he has clung to all these years. Gatsby’s inability to confront the uncertainties of the past is eventually his undoing, as he is unable to see that Daisy and Tom “[are] careless people” who make a mess of things “and let other people clean [it] up.”(Fitzgerald, p. 214) Ultimately, “The Great Gatsby,” highlights the negative effects that avoiding the past has on an individual. In trying to dwell on the better aspects of the past, individuals often neglect to accept their current reality and are forced to deal with the eventual