Examples Of Inauthenticity In The Great Gatsby

A Failed Dream: How Inauthenticity Leads to an Empty Life Money is the root of all evil. While Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald is not necessarily and evil character, he loses part of himself in the desire for wealth as he attempts to attract the attention of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy woman who married into a prestigious family. Gatsby is an inauthentic character because his shallow love of Daisy leads to a false sense of the reality of his relationship with her; thus he does not achieve the American Dream through his failure to achieve happiness along with his wealth Gatsby’s inauthenticity is rooted in how his love of Daisy is surface level and relies heavily on Daisy’s status in society showing how his

Gatsby and Daisy reunite for the first time and make their way towards Gatsby’s house. According to Nick, “He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of the response it drew from her well-loved eyes”(Fitzgerald 91). Gatsby stresses the importance of grandeur with his possessions solely to attract Daisy’s attention. His opinions lose legitimacy when he decides that his stuff is important to him if it appeals to Daisy. By reducing his opinions to be whatever Daisy’s is, he loses his authenticity as a character. At this point in the novel, Gatsby has told Nick that he is willing to take the blame for Myrtle’s death and now is talking about Daisy. Fitzgerald writes, “It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy-it increased her value in his eyes”(149). The way Daisy is described

At this point, Daisy has just left Gatsby’s party and he is upset that she did not enjoy it. He claims that he can reclaim what he and Daisy once had but Nick sees that this is not possible. Nick says, “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself that had gone into loving Daisy”(Fitzgerald 110). Gatsby has spent the past five years dreaming up a version of Daisy that no longer exists. By loving the idea of Daisy rather than actually loving Daisy, he loses the genuine part of himself that once cared for