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Examples Of Reality In The Great Gatsby

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The headspace people live in determines their ways of living; a positive mindset typically results in positively viewing life. However, when one removes themself from real life and creates a false world to live in ignorantly, their mindset becomes negative because reality will never live up to their false reality. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates that, when people create a fantasy in their heads, they lose sight of reality and subsequently act without regard to themselves and the people around them. Living in a fantasy can cause the sight of reality to be lost. Throughout the book, Fitzgerald depicts Jay Gatsby as wanting something he cannot have; Daisy. Gatsby and Daisy used to be together happily, but now Daisy is married …show more content…

Gatsby has lived in this daydream for so long—a daydream where he can live happily ever after with Daisy—that he no longer knows how to ground himself back into reality. He becomes so lost in his fantasy that “he throw[s] dust into the eyes” (136) of others around him; when Nick says he cannot “repeat the past,” Gatsby claims that “of course [he] can,” because Gatsby is currently trying to repeat his past with Daisy (85). When Daisy takes part in this affair, she is aware of how it will affect others around her and continues to pursue it anyway because of “her careless[ness]” (47); but Gatsby is almost clueless. In his mind, there are only him and Daisy, and no further complications, because that’s how his fantasy plays out. But Gatsby fails to realize that his fantasy is far from reality and that his aspiration for this unattainable reality would hurt the people around him. The choices he made to attain a fantasy led to Mildred’s death, George’s suicide, and his own murder. Despite his power to alter the course of his life and the lives of others, Gatsby still fails to reach his fantasy. He dies without having won Daisy back from Tom; by the end, Tom and Daisy are still together, perhaps stronger than before, which is the exact opposite of what Gatsby wanted. When a person is driven to reach an unattainable dream, their steps to reaching that dream can both

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