Ambition In The Great Gatsby

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the central and pinnacle character, Jay Gatsby, overindulges in zeal and initiative in order to try and achieve his somewhat trivial goal of a relationship with Daisy Buchanan. Using money and wealth acquired from scanty sources, such as drug businesses and smuggling, Gatsby tries to regain Daisy’s love by attempting to enter the upper class. His goal is represented with the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock across the peninsular waterway. This objective is heavily distinguished by the American Dream, which is defined as the application of hard work for any American to achieve prosperity and success. Gatsby does lots of preparation and hard work for his dream of establishing a strong bond with

Gatsby is considerably hard on himself for this, but he continues to strive to achieve his dreams, which by now are made impossible in his unrecognized reality. By emphasizing this truth through implication, Fitzgerald outlines the flawed principles of Gatsby’s ambition: he’s clearly too narrow-minded to realize that his dreams of love with Daisy are more idealistic than feasible. The physical and social distance between Gatsby and Daisy is a big symbol of this collapsed ambition, which is greatly highlighted with the stretch of water between West Egg and East Egg (Gatsby and Daisy’s home locations, respectively), and the class differences between them. For the duration of the novel, Gatsby is filled with defective ambition to achieve his impossible goal of winning Daisy’s love, which ends up making him extremely naïve to the grim reality of his condition, and destroys the reputation he had with most of his acquaintances, securing the manifestation of his

During their interactions, Daisy does not comprehend how Gatsby has sacrificed much of his life to his wealth, which in turn, was supposed to win her love. Instead, Gatsby managed to make his dream unrealizable after Tom disowns his achievements, only assuring that Daisy would stay with Tom despite Gatsby’s passion. Only Nick Carraway, with his critical narration, managed to see Gatsby’s true selfless nature as Gatsby intended Daisy to. Evidently, Daisy would seem only attracted to those a part of “Old Money”, or those who had truly inherited their wealth. This further made Gatsby’s dream quite impossible – he never had the stature to win Daisy’s picky love in the first place. Gatsby’s ambition ended up making him extremely dislikeable to Daisy and Tom, simply due to the exaggeration and lying he had to do to enhance his social appearance, and neither of them recognized the pureness of his undemanding desires like Nick