The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece “The Great Gatsby” This novel on the surface looks as if it is about a tragic romantic story of lost love between a man Jay Gatsby and a woman, Daisy Buchanan. But it involves a much larger less romantic aspect. The novel takes place over a few months during the summer of 1922 on Long Island, New York. It is a commentary of the disappearing American dream during an era of prosperity and material excess. Daisy is that lost American dream for Jay Gatsby. The story is about the good looking and mysterious Jay Gatsby who lives on Long Island on the North Shore in a house where he entertains hundreds of guests who at one of his huge parties. Gatsby is a mystery. No one knows how he had made his money. Some say that he’d stolen it; some say he inherited it, and some say that he killed people to get it. Nick Carraway, Daisy’s cousin, who lives next door to Gatsby. Nick Carraway represents the idealistic person, who is a part of the rich and beautiful society, and is still able to retain his goodness, and morality.

Daisy and her crude but wealthy husband represent the frivolous, selfish rich, the American Dream. [He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you, as you would like to believe in yourself; Chapt III; Pg.53]. I find Gatsby to be a lost lonely man trying desperately to regain his past by wanting Daisy back. Gatsby reveals to Nick that he and Daisy had an affair before the War and her marriage to Tom. Gatsby also reveals his real name as James Gatz born of a poor Order#31115198 The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald Pg.2 Midwestern family. He had accumulated his wealth through shady dealings to make himself the kind of man he thinks Daisy wants. His dream and one and only goal is to get Daisy back. She is Gatsby’s green light, his goal. [Gatsby believed in the green light the Orgasmic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter.

-Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further….and then one fine morning- so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, Chapt IX; Pg. 198] Gatsby tries to persuade Nick to help bring Daisy and him back together, however Gatsby is unable to win her back because she is totally devoted to her rich, volatile, crude husband and instead she has a flighty, dangerous, frivolous affair with Gatsby. [I hope she’ll be a fool- that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool; Chapter I; Pg. 21] in this quote Daisy is accepting her role in society as a beautiful, flighty, superfluous woman who is not valued as intelligent and is abused. Daisy gets bored during an outing in Manhattan and drives Gatsby’s car. She runs over and kills Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, not knowing she is her husband’s mistress. Nick encourages Daisy to turn herself in after they find out Myrtle is dead. Not knowing what to do, Daisy goes crazy. She disassociates herself from the accident not taking responsibility, which Gatsby encourages and her cousin doesn’t.

I felt Daisy ran away from her responsibility, letting her men Nick, Gatsby and Tom to help her out of her dilemma. In the end I feel as if Gatsby wasted his life for nothing. He became rich, only to die alone because he wanted to be worthy of Daisy who was married and wouldn’t leave her husband for him. She only had the affair because she was getting back at her husband. He only saw the young Daisy not the woman she had become after the War. [That’s my Middle West. The street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark..I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all Tom, Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common, which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life; Chapter IX; Pg.184].

-Works Cited-

The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald; 1925, Charles Scribner’s Sons WWW. Sparknotes.com/lit/Gatsby/summary.html. Gradesaver: The Great Gatsby.