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Romanticize The Past In The Great Gatsby

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Romanticizing the Past
Do not allow romanticizing the past to ruin the life you have now (Bernard). To romanticize the past means to be in love with objects or people from the past. Jay Gatsby spends his post-war life romanticizing about the relationship he had with Daisy Buchanan before he left for war. He remained in love with Daisy, or at least the Daisy he originally knew, even after she had moved on with life and married Tom Buchanan. Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy was so powerful that it influenced and took over his life. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby's romanticizing the past restricted him from moving on with life after Daisy married Tom Buchanan.
Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan had a relationship prior to her marriage to Tom Buchanan. Gatsby and Daisy were young and in love. They met in …show more content…

He doesn't know that Daisy had moved on from him and married Tom Buchanan “He doesn’t know very much about Tom, though he says he’s read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy’s name” (Fitzgerald 79). Gatsby learned from the newspaper that Daisy was married to Tom. This did not stop him from loving Daisy, he continued to romanticize the past with Daisy. The fact that he had read the paper for years trying to see her name highlights his obsession with his past relationship with Daisy.
Gatsby had known that Daisy was from old money and he needed to make his fortune in order to support her and allow her to the live the lifestyle she is used to. In the book, Gatsby is a very rich man, but it is not clear how Gatsby made his fortune. Clearly, the book implies that he did it in ways that were not completely legitimate as is highlighted by his relationship with Meyer Wolfsheim. However, Gatsby is so possessed with wealth in order to win Daisy that he would do about anything, including shady business

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Sadly, their relationship was cut short by Gatsby leaving for the war and their separation really affected both Daisy and Gatsby who haven’t recovered since. “...how her mother had found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas... After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any more...” (Pg.81). As the reader can see from the passage, Daisy and Gatsby had a very close and intimate relationship that neither has recovered from following their abrupt

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Characters in novels can have obsessions with people, the same as in the world readers live in today. In the book, The Great Gatsby, the main, male character, Gatsby, is obsessed with a woman named Daisy Buchanan. In the passage Winter Dreams, Dexter, the main male character, is obsessed with a woman, Judy Jones. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote both of these novels/ passages introducing the same theme. The Great Gatsby is a story about a man who has revolved part of his life around trying to achieve his American dream by conforming to a woman and society 's standards.

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In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald portrays love, obsession, and objectification through the characters Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Some might say their love was true and Gatsby’s feelings for her was pure affection, while others say that he objectifies and is obsessed with her. Perhaps Gatsby confuses lust and obsession with love, and throughout the novel, he is determined to win his old love back. At the end of the novel, Gatsby is met with an untimely death and never got to be with Daisy. The reader is left to determined if Gatsby’s and Daisy’s love was pure and real, or just wasn’t meant to be.

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Unfortunately, he had to leave Daisy to go to war. After the war, he was determined to find Daisy but five years later, his feelings are not reciprocated; Daisy toys with him, uses Gatsby to make her husband jealous, and allows Gatsby to take the blame for the murder of her husband’s mistress. The most tragic of the three protagonists studied is Jay Gatsby because he demoralizes himself in a futile attempt at expired love, he has few genuine companions, and he cannot let go of the past. Throughout the novel, the contrast between Gatsby's pure past and corrupt future illustrates the degree to which he changes to impress his love, Daisy.

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At one point in the book he lets Nick in and tells him a great deal of his past, but he never reveals to Nick how he acquired his great wealth and status. However in a later chapter when Nick, Daisy, Tom, Gatsby, and Jordan go to lunch. While at this lunch Tom reveals he has done some research on Gatsby and says “I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.” (Gatsby 7,133) this shows us that where Gatsby money came from isn’t legit and he’s a gangster of sorts.

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Gatsby thinks of himself as a dream chaser, a person who is working hard through his life to get his beautiful memory back to him. Money is just a tool to bring his beloved girl back. People believed that his money all came from his rich family as Gatsby wants them to, which means that he was born rich. However, Gatsby actually earned the money on his own by taking high risks selling illegal alcohol. Since he knew that Daisy married a rich man, he decided never to live without money.

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In the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the past comes up quite a bit for a few of the characters and Fitzgerald shows how the past affects each of the characters. Each character in the book has their own unique characteristics that create who they are. In this book it is explained what happened in Gatsby’s past and how he was able to become the successful person that he now. Throughout the book, Fitzgerald shows us how Gatsby keeps looking back at his past, especially when Daisy is involved she is everything to him and the biggest reason that he wants what he had in the past to come back.

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They both have that need to have a women, but they don 't seem to really care about the inner lives of them. Gatsby’s one and only love is Daisy, she is higher on the social class scale than he is, and married to Tom Buchanan. Gatsby is very passionate about her and has been for the entire five years they have known each other. He goes as far as to buy a house across the bay just so she would notice him. He also seems to not care that she is still married to Tom, and gets frustrated when she doesn 't comply with his request for her to ditch him.

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Imagination, it cures desires and provides satisfaction to some people who can not have everything they want. Although providing a temporary positive effect, it also can distort the reality. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby spends five years watching Daisy from across the lake, creating an imaginary future for them in his head. Gatsby ultimately dooms their relationship by creating this abstract world and standards that they simply can not meet. The world in which Gatsby believed in, required the past to be repeated, something in which Daisy had moved far away from.

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Whenever asked the question on how Gatsby maked his money, he would always answer that he built up a few drugstores and when his parents died he inherited money. Gatsby was never telling the truth about this; and Tom eventually figured this out. Gatsby wanted to appear as old money to impress Daisy which is why he lied. However, the reason why Gatsby never told the truth about how he made his money was because he was making his money illegally. In chapter seven, Tom accuses Gatsby of being a bootlegger, “He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter” (133).

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Gatsby falls in love with Daisy the first minute he meets her and never stops loving her even though she has obviously moved on. Gatsby does everything he can to be closer to her like buying “that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay” (78). Gatsby knows that if he can get the girl of his dreams he will not feel lonely anymore. " He talked a lot about the past… he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was” (87).

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In the novel “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, what Jay Gatsby feels for Daisy Buchanan is obsession. Gatsby revolves and rearranges his entire life in order to gain her affections. Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy resulted in him buying a mansion across the lake from her, throwing huge parties, and spending years of his life trying to become rich. Gatsby bought mansion intentionally across the lake from Daisy just to be closer to her.

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