In The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, one of the characters is “stuck in the past”. Throughout the novel, Gatsby is constantly longing for a past relationship he had with a woman named Daisy, who moved on from Gatsby and married another man when Gatsby left for the war. Gatsby’s view of the past is used to develop a major theme of the novel: the moral decay of society.
The novel begins with Nick, the narrator saying how the events that happened in New York, where the novel takes place, caused him to leave, and how he doesn’t like any of the people he was involved with. As the novel progresses, Nick becomes friends with a man named Gatsby, who is viewed as a mysterious figure to outsiders. Nick finds out his second cousin once removed, Daisy was once in love with Gatsby. Unfortunately for Gatsby, Daisy was more focused on money and the social power, so when he went to war, she did not wait for him, and instead married Tom Buchanan who had lots of “old” money. This shows the moral decay of society because Daisy left a man she loved (Gatsby) because she could not wait for him and he did not have the money. The name Daisy itself shows moral decay because in the novel the color yellow symbolizes moral decay. A daisy (flower) is white and pretty on the outside “She (Daisy) dressed in white and had a little white roadster” (79), but yellow on the inside, just like Daisy in the novel. Gatsby saw the white in Daisy because he was stuck in the past, and he saw her as the girl he