Jay 's Obsession in The Great Gatsby There is a fine line between love and lust. If love is only a will to possess, it is not love. To love someone is to hold them dear to one 's heart. In The Great Gatsby, the characters, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan are said to be in love, but in reality, this seems to be a misconception. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald portrays the themes of love, lust and obsession, through the character of Jay Gatsby, who confuses lust and obsession with love. The character of Jay Gatsby was a wealthy business man, who the author developed as arrogant and tasteless. Gatsby 's love interest, Daisy Buchanan, was a subdued socialite who was married to the dim witted Tom Buchanan. She is the perfect example of how women of her level of society were supposed to act in her day. The circumstances surrounding Gatsby and Daisy 's relationship kept them eternally apart. For Daisy to have been with Gatsby would have been forbidden, due to the fact that she was married. That very concept of their love being forbidden, also made it all the more intense, for the idea of having a prohibited love, like William Shakespeare 's Romeo and Juliet, made it all the more desirable. Gatsby was remembering back five years to when Daisy was not married and they were together: His heart began to beat faster as Daisy 's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his