The Tea Rose In The Great Gatsby

“There is a ghost here. A lonely, heartbroken spirit. The ghost of everything that could've been and never was” (Jennifer Donnelly, The Tea Rose) This quote is a fantastic representation of Gatsby and how he yearns for something that could have been but never was, Daisy. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the reader on a journey through the perspective of Nick as he observes his neighbor Gatsby's quest to make his dreams a reality. Gatsby’s dream was to relive the past and reconnect with a lover named daisy whom he was in a relationship with five years ago, but he struggles with this task because she is not that same person as back then and has moved on. Throughout the book he struggles to bring this dream into reality but eventually

“ Through the twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she again was keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed.” (Gatsby 158). As time went on and on daisy started to get restless and ended up straying away from her original intentions of waiting for Gatsby to return. Instead daisy started flirt and hook up with other guys, at first it was just for fun to cure her boredom until Gatsby's return until she met Tom and fell in love. Daisy’s betrayal of her original intentions baffles Gatsby throughout the book. A modern piece of music corroborates this idea of confusion over someone breaking their promises and moving ion is illustrated in Chance the Rappers song “Same Drugs”. “Where did you go?/Why would you stay?/You must have lost your marbles/You always were so forgetful/In a hurry, don't wait up/I was too late, I was too late/A shadow of what I once was/Cause we don't, we don't do what we say we're gonna” In this passage Chance poses questions like, “Where did you go?” and , “Why would you stay?”. These questions portray to the listener the same feelings that Gatsby felt. The feelings that Gatsby

“ As I went over to say goodbye, I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams…” throughout the night Daisy showed Gatsby more and more that she is no longer that same person that he remembers from five years ago. Because of this he is left disappointed and confused due to the fact that he had not expected daisy to have changed. In Modern Music this exact idea of being confused by someone's changes from the past to the present is presented in Chance the Rapper's song “ Same Drugs” when he states “When did you change? / Wendy you've aged / I thought / you'd never grow up/I thought you'd never… / Window closed, Wendy got old / I was too late, I was too late / A shadow of what I once was.” In this Chance expresses his confusion because this person that he is reuniting with from the past is no longer the same person in the present. This same “Don't forget the happy thoughts / All you need is happy thoughts / The past tense, past bedtime / Way back then when everything we read was real / And everything we said rhymed / Wide eyed kids being kids / When did you stop? /