The Great Gatsby Reality

Reality is something that many can not grasp. Lost in a daydream or lost in their expectations, often, people are left with disappointment. These negative feelings are those humans often try to hide from. Our capacity to feel any source of pain is so low that time and time again, humans will retreat back into a world of painless existence; misinterpreting on how life is supposed to be versus how it actually is. The complex relationship between Daisy and Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s historical fiction novel, The Great Gatsby, exemplifies how living in this falsehood of a world can lead the demise of someone like Gatsby, “...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

Gatsby’s perfect ideal is Daisy and him being together like they were before the war but it shortly came to an end when she ran over her husband’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Gatsby said nothing and took her fault as if it was his own. His idea to protect Daisy’s perfect image lead to failure when Myrtle’s husband was convinced by the persuasion of Tom; thinking his wife was killed by Gatsby. Gatsby longingly waited for Daisy, waiting for her to love him once more. As the iridescent green light became more faint, Gatsby became more lost. He lost that “old warm world”, with the use of the words “warm”, Fitzgerald insinuates positive feelings of how it was, to create a feeling of nostalgia. The ideals of the “old”, the past, the world in which Daisy and Gatsby had the “perfect life”. Their happy life was the source of Gatsby’s happiness but along the way, he had “lost” it, simply meaning he had lost grasp of his happiness. The “lost old warm world” fabricates a false reality in which Gatsby perceived he lived in. Gatsby’s dead set world of Daisy and him caused him to realize that he “paid a high price for living too long with a single dream”. Fitzgerald’s use of “single dream” symbolized the fixture on his one goal, his unwillingness to change to another. Hence Gatsby has to pay a high price of losing his grand illusion, then watching his dream die, and ultimately losing his