In Fitzgerald’s work, The Great Gatsby, the character Jay Gatsby shows many struggles and hardships as he seeks to gain power over others. As Jay’s motives become more controlling, the intended theme of the book of achieving the American dream, is overshadowed by greed and human lust. In the novel, Jay Gatsby, a manipulative and wealthy man, longs for his old lover, Daisy Buchannan. However, conflict arises when it is found out that Daisy is engaged to another man.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays the lives of wealthy Americans living in the success and grandeur of the Roaring Twenties. Within the novel, the epoch’s legacy of material want and the need for human connection clash in the form of Daisy Buchanan. Her inner conflict between the two desires are symbolized in Jay’s letter and Tom’s pearls. Jay’s letter to Daisy Buchanan proves the romance of their relationship, while Tom’s pearls ultimately represents Daisy’s decision to abandon that love for wealth.
In the novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald reflects on the human need for self-fulfilment through his characters committing themselves to a person, an object, or a goal that takes them away from the reality that conflicts with what they want their life to look like. Though nearly everyone is The Great Gatsby is remarkably wealthy or of an upstanding family, they all experience dark times, and because of this they need to dedicate themselves to something as way of an escape, because even if everything is wrong, a person can still work towards something to make it, or themselves, better. The tragic character of Jay Gatsby has dedicated years of his life to striving towards Daisy, a woman whose way of life contrasted so greatly from
Despite what the title suggests, within “The Great Gatsby”, Jay Gatsby is neither truly great, nor even named Gatsby. His elaborate transition from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, both literally and figuratively changing his identity, completing an ingenious façade to replicate the essence of greatness Gatsby sees in the aristocracy. Although Gatsby attempts to build his own greatness through material wealth, his only means is through the criminal activities of Wolfstein, with this unsavoury connection to the insidious underbelly of New York City undermining Gatsby’s quest for greatness. It is only from the distinctive perspective of Nick Carraway that the idea of Gatsby as “great” emerges. As explained by Carraway, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” (pg. 140), this glamourous hopefulness being what attracts Carraway towards Gatsby, with Gatsby representing the idea of the American Dream for Nick Carraway.
Society has given birth to several great individuals who pursue great dreams. These individuals rely heavily on their personalities and accomplishments to be considered great. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby finds great amounts of money and success following his own desired journey rooting from nothing. Daisy Buchanan, the love of his dreams, is Gatsby’s main goal for pushing through life, willing to go to any lengths to gain her love back. Nick Carroway, a close friend to Gatsby, analyzes how Gatsby portrays his personality and actions through close observation.
Jay Gatsby, the title character of the novel “The Great Gatsby” is a man that can not seem to live without the love of his life. Trying to win Daisy over consumes Gatsby’s life as he tries to become the person he thinks she would approve of. What most readers do not realize is that Jay Gatsby’s character mirrors many personality traits and concerns that the author of novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had. In fact, Gatsby and Fitzgerald are similar in that they both had a girl they wanted to win over, took a strong stance on alcohol, and ironically both had similar funerals, also, both people also symbolize the American dream.
In life, what is perceived tends to show misconception in how thoughts play out. One prime character in the novel is, Jay Gatsby, he was not capable to decide between the love he felt for Daisy and the illusion that he could recapture her love by inventing a false past. Jay believed he could repeat the past. In the novel, Jay Gatsby refuses to establish the differences in the reality of his life and his illusions for his love for Daisy. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic: “The Great Gatsby,” displays how deception effects when one falls in love and when one realizes reality.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald skillfully highlights Gatsby's ultimate failure in achieving the American Dream, underscored by the illusion he creates and his misplaced faith in this dream. Driven by an insatiable desire for wealth and social status, Gatsby constructs an elaborate facade in a desperate attempt to win back Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loves. However, this grand illusion of success and happiness eventually crumbles, exposing the profound emptiness and moral decay that lie beneath its surface. As the novel's narrator, Nick Carraway, keenly observes, "There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality
In today’s duplicitous society, men often pursue the “perfect woman”. This woman is construed to be; fit, provocative and ravishing. However, in greatly distinguished American novel, The Great Gatsby, the men have strayed from stalking women for their looks. Instead, Gatsby chases Daisy to achieve her as a prize of his bounty and any affection Gatsby demonstrates toward her, is simply to appease to her sense of status and wealth. The author F. Scott Fitzgerald, exhibits Gatsby’s these feelings for Daisy through the clever usage of connotation, symbolism and metaphors.
Instead of accepting the truth about the ones we care for it is easier to make your own illusion of that person. This idea is shown through the relationship between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Over the summer in which the novel is set, Nick helps reunite Gatsby with his long-lost, perfect love, Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is characterized as elegant and charming, but also shallow. So, in the case of Daisy and Gatsby “there must have been moments… when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion” (Fitzgerald 76).
Gatsby’s absorption in the pursuit of Daisy [fantasy] does not end here; he continually focuses on the past so much so that he does not acknowledge the time in which he and Daisy were not together. Fitzgerald illustrates this detachment from reality through the first moment Gatsby saw Daisy’s child. From Nick’s point of view, Gatsby “...kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before”(117). Gatsby was so wrapped up in his goal to obtain Daisy’s love that he never even recognized the time they spent apart as real.
A self-made man is what most would consider what Gatsby could be when his past was first explained about how he came into so many riches. Some people would consider a self-made person to be a hard worker and had to work to get to where they are in their comfortable place in society. Gatsby is one to work, but he had to have a little bit of outside help to get to where he is. Yet, Nick has suspicion as to what Gatsby tries to hide behind his seemingly devil-may-care attitude and his multiplicity of summer parties. Gatsby is one of those who wasn’t born into riches like those with Old Money and had to really work to get it; however, his views of what a self-made man is different from how Nick would view it and how an average person would see it, so he could be taking that too seriously.
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.” (F Scott Fitzgerald, pg 1) In being a self made man such as Gatsby was, there are connections made which can be beneficial or damaging. There are also many characteristics that can come with being a self made man that F. Scott Fitzgerald discusses in The Great Gatsby.
Gatsby’s misguided efforts to win Daisy's affection are a result of a psychological struggle to fulfil the desires of his id. However, his inability to reconcile these desires with the unfortunate reality of the situation trigger subconscious mechanisms that further distort his perception of reality. It is through a psychoanalytic lens that one is able to analyze the foundation for Gatsby’s flaws and explain his eventual psychological and spiritual resolution as a tragic hero. Gatsby’s conflicted psyche, more specifically, his inability to satisfy his desire for Daisy, illustrates that an id untempered by the reasoning of the ego will eventually lead to a person’s demise.
The self-made man is a paragon of virtue and is often paralleled with the idea of a meritocracy. In his novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald challenges the reality of the American dream through Nick Carraway, a fairly well off young man with no tangible end goal in life. Since Nick does not have a real dream, he compares the many dreamers in his life to the ideal self-made man. The American dream can be defined as a ‘rags-to-riches’ story, where a self-made man virtuously amasses unlimited success and wealth. Fitzgerald believes that upward class mobility is impossible without help and fraud, and describes three factions of people to disprove the American myth of the self-made man.
