Examples Of Personage In The Great Gatsby

When a dream is built up to unrealistic heights, reality often can’t reach it. Richard Lehan argues this through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby when he says “Fitzgerald had conceptualized an idea of self based on the principles of ‘personage’... a sense of an essential self that made one different from others and gave total focus to one’s purpose and the sense of the meaning in life… To desire was ironically, more important than to have.. To lose this romantic conception of self is to move from a kind of heaven of the mind to a hell”. Lehan is correct in that James Gatz’s personage of Jay Gatsby, his ideal self and the embodiment of affluence, drives his dream to share a luxurious life with Daisy Buchanan; however, the idea of possessing

Gatsby wants his relationship with Daisy to be “just as if it were five years ago”(109), so when he meets her daughter “he [keeps] looking at the child with surprise”, Nick describes that he doesn’t think that “[Gatsby] had ever really believed in its existence before”(117). Gatsby has no conception of Daisy’s current life, only the one he has in his mind, so when he sees her real life, it tarnishes his idea of his forthcoming life with Daisy. In a like manner, Gatsby’s “hell of the mind” culminates when Daisy can’t say that she never loved Tom and tells Gatsby “I love you now--isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past” and consequently “the words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby”(132). Gatsby’s dream is built upon the belief that Daisy has been equally in love with him for the past five years, so this information takes a cruel blow at his entire purpose. This continues when Gatsby attempts to clear his name from Tom’s accusations against his character, but “with every word [Daisy] was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room”(134). Although he’s still holding on, Daisy’s role in his idealized life is over. Gatsby knows this when “he [stretches] out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever”(153). Gatsby’s realizes his Daisy is now gone forever. Reality essentially consumes Gatsby’s idealized Daisy, leaving him with nothing but his now insignificant wealth; in essence destroying his entire