Daisy's Ambition In The Great Gatsby

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“Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing. ‘I never loved him,’ she said, with perceptible reluctance” (Fitzgerald 101). In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald follows Nick Carraway as he is thrown into the lives of Jay Gatsby, his cousin Daisy, Tom Buchanan, and the internal struggles that are faced by them revolving around wealth and love, leading to the demise of Gatsby and Nick realizing the true people that Tom and Daisy are. With that, Fitzgerald uses Gatsby and his relationship with Daisy and his poor background to showcase not only the rags to riches idea, but also how Gatsby’s past influenced his actions in the novel. Gatsby constantly longs for his past life with Daisy, …show more content…

Gatsby’s overly ambitious attitude from a young age “pays off” in the end with him attaining his goal of being very wealthy, but he sacrifices doing it in an honest way and loses himself along the way. All of this culminates in themes of the negativity of focusing on the past as the only reason for working hard towards the future, and how the sole focus on wealth as the meaning of “success” ruins lives. Fitzgerald explores how Gatsby’s need to be ultra-rich after living a poor past causes him to develop immoral traits and miss out on having real relationships with people. This is proven with nobody even showing up at his funeral, alluding to the fact that he didn’t have any real friends. With Gatsby obsessed over his past and having used it as fuel for his future, he neglected the true purpose of life. In The Great Gatsby, author F. Scott Fitzgerald uses Jay Gatsby’s past life as the rudder for all aspects of his life, with his obsession to be back with Daisy and his sole focus on being extraordinarily wealthy causing him to lose himself in the process and get killed as a

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