How Does Gatsby Conform To His Future

Haaris Khan Barry C Mod 7 June, 2024 In the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald provides the dimension of vision through the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, attempting to conform to his future to revive his past. Fitzgerald represents a vision of a clash between social mobility and one’s past background, the truth of the American Dream. In his endeavors of living what he thinks is an ideal life, Gatsby’s vision is comprised of the will to recreate the past, determine identity, and come to terms with misleading appearances Gatsby ascends through the social hierarchy but with an intent to recreate his past relationship which illustrates the impracticality of his vision. An instance of impracticality is when Tom finds out about Gatsby and Daisy’s

Nick reminisces about the odd interaction: ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. ‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,’ he said, nodding determinedly. ‘She’ll see’ (110) Gatsby’s reaction displays his delusion and inability to see his failures. His goal to put everything back so that Daisy could return to him was not to be altered. Similarly, his looking around crazily at his surroundings supports the fact that he is emulsified and blinded in his conviction that he can achieve his past. All of these contribute to a major defect of inadaptability in his vision. The identity of Gatsby is something he imagined at a very young age and brought to life when he had the means to. Fitzgerald sets up Gatsby in a rags-to-riches situation as he’s born dirt poor, but we find out how he came to be the young, wealthy man he presents himself as. As Nick depicts, he had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his

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. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. (161) The “high price” that Gatsby paid was both death and years wasted creating the kind of life that would please Daisy, his most sought-after “single dream.” Except for her, he’d accumulated everything that fulfilled his vision of transforming from the peasant he was born to the divine, wealthy man he believed he was destined to become. Fitzgerald’s visionary presentation results in the self-destruction of Gatsby, the tragic hero who is willing to go to any length for the culmination of his dreams. This destruction is the reality of the vision. The symbols of the “grotesque” rose and “raw” sunlight support the fact that Gatsby’s perception has negatively changed from what he once thought life to be.