Green Light In The Great Gatsby

Is the American dream really all about having a lot of money and being well-known? In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses Jay Gatsby’s unhappiness, Daisy, and the motif of the green light that the stereotypical American dream is not a direct path to satisfaction. Although Jay Gatsby is a wealthy man who has achieved the standard American dream, he was still missing one thing: a life with Daisy. She is a woman who is in an unhappy marriage with Tom Buchanan and, for the most part, only cared about money. Even though the green light on Daisy and Tom’s dock is for guiding boats at night, Gatsby sees it as a reminder to keep moving toward his dream of being with Daisy. Achieving the American dream is a huge accomplishment to anybody, but

After Gatsby admits he wants to marry Daisy in Louisville, which is where they met, Nick explains that, "he talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps that had gone into loving Daisy,” (Fitzgerald 110). Nick suggests that Gatsby’s obsession with the past does not come from his love for Daisy, but rather a nostalgic investment in realizing that the possibility of a marriage with Daisy could never truly happen. When Nick put himself in Gatsby’s shoes, he realized that, “Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream,” (Fitzgerald 161). When Nick put himself in Gatsby’s position, he realized that Gatsby thought that his wealth was the key to earning Daisy back, but unfortunately, his wealth was never enough to satisfy her. To go along with why Gatsby was unhappy, his American dream was unlike the rest of everyone around