The Great Gatsby: What Love Does
Love has always been to people the temporary feeling they experience when with the subject of their interest; when that feeling disappears they claim that love is tragic and dangerous. In the book, The Great Gatsby, I can see many instances where the characters all have a twisted idea of love and because they know no better, they go about destroying each other’s lives.
The novel, The Great Gatsby is a sad story based on the topic of lost love. Gatsby, the protagonist of the story, based his love for Daisy on the young girl she was before he went off to war. During their time apart, Gatsby strived to live the American Dream while Daisy enjoyed a life of being adored by the rich. The character Daisy is described by the author throughout the novel as a fickle and shallow young
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He thought he fell in love with Daisy but we can see he fell in love with the life she lives instead. Before Gatsby went on to fight the war he made Daisy promise that she would wait for him; Gatsby, being wooed by her wealthy life vowed to come back a wealthy man, but she never did keep her promise. While Gatsby was gone Daisy flourished in her artificial life and soon moved on from him. In Gatsby’s case, distance made his heart weaker for her. It soon became evident that Gatsby tracked Daisy’s life when he showed her clippings on their first meeting. “Look at this,” said Gatsby quickly. “Here is a lot of clippings -about you.” (Line 90) He knew in order to be on the receiving end of Daisy affections he would have to acquire wealth, even if it meant acquiring the money through illegal means. Once Daisy gave up on waiting for Gatsby, her love is soon bought by a new suitor of hers, Tom Buchanan with a thirty-thousand dollar pearl necklace; after all, it is money and excitement she desires the
In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby functions under the illusion that Daisy is perfect and is living in such distress because she was forced to marry Tom due to Gatsby being away at war and being poor. This illusion leads Gatsby to spend his entire adult life pining after Daisy and cheating his way up the social and economic ladder in order to win her over. Gatsby believes that Daisy will someday come back to him because she loves him so much and they will live happily ever after together.
Daisy and Gatsby spend five years away from each other and when they get back together, the circumstances change. Daisy gets married to Tom Buchanan. Gatsby has no option except for grabbing Daisy’s attention. The love that the readers realize is passionate however this love changes into a forbidden one because Daisy is now married. Gatsby tries his best to convince Daisy that everything will go back like they used to, but she doesn’t seem to agree. The past cannot be repeated. Tom sees the love between Daisy and Gatsby but he does not say anything until the right time. The circumstances that are happening to both Daisy and Gatsby make their love forbidden. As much as Gatsby is very rich, he does not seem to be enough because he’s new money
Love is vastly covered in “ The Great Gatsby “. The book itself is surrounded by love and everything within the book has to do with love. Gatsby and Daisy knew each other 5 years before they meet again in New York. They were lovers and Then Gatsby had to go off to war and he did not have a lot of money so Daisy marries Tom Buchanan. Even after 5 years away from each other Gatsby still deeply longs for Daisy. Gatsby says to Tom “ I told you what is going on, going on for five years and you didn’t know “ (131). As he tells Tom of them being together, you can also
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:
Love is a power that is able to bind two different people together forever. It is also a power that gives someone the drive to have a much harder work ethic so they can achieve the goal that they set for themselves. In The Great Gatsby, this is seen through the character Gatsby often throughout the novel as Gatsby tries to center his world around Daisy, the love of his life. Although some may argue that it is the attainment of Daisy that brings Gatsby satisfaction, the quest to get her is what truly grants him fulfilment because his overdramatic five year obsession causing him to over glorify her and the desire for her gave him something to work towards.
Nothing is more important, to most people, than friendships and family, thus, by breaking those bonds, it draws an emotional response from the readers. Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan had a relationship before he went off to fight in the war. When he returned home, he finds her with Tom Buchanan, which seems to make him jealous since he still has feelings for Daisy. He wanted Daisy “to go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you” (Fitzgerald 118) Gatsby eventually tells Tom that his “wife doesn’t love [him]” and that she only loves Gatsby (Fitzgerald 121). But the unpleasant truth is that Daisy never loved anyone, but she loved something: money. Daisy “wanted her life shaped and the decision made by some force of of money, of unquestionable practicality” (Fitzgerald 161). The Roaring Twenties were a time where economic growth swept the nation and Daisy was looking to capitalize on that opportunity. Her greed for material goods put her in a bind between two wealthy men, yet they are still foolish enough to believe that she loved them. Jay Gatsby is a man who has no relationships other than one with Nick Caraway, so he is trying to use his wealth to lure in a greedy individual to have love mend his
To explain the basis behind their relationship; Gatsby first met daisy at a party at her house that her parents were hosting for young army men in hopes that their daughter would find that could be a suitable husband. Soon after they became so close and fell madly in love. Daisy came from old money and gatsby had no money at all which made their relationship come to a halt when Gatsby asked to marry Daisy. With a breaking heart Daisy had to turn him down because she couldn’t marry someone that couldn’t provide what she needed...fabulous wealth. Many years past as Gatsby went to war, came back to war, and got a job helping Dan Cody on his voyages. After Gatsby7 was denied the money that Dan Cody wanted to inherit to him he got into the business of bootlegging which made him filthy rich. Everything he did over the course of the years was for Daisy so he could finally get to be with her. Sadly Gatsby later found out that Daisy had gotten married to a man named Tom Buchanan leaving Gatsby torn that Daisy did not wait for him to get rich. All gatsby had now was hope and a love so strong for Daisy that it made his heart ache. Tom narrates, “But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic
Love, love, love; the only thing everybody talks about. Every movie, every series, every story talks about how two people fall in love and live happily ever after. All stories get to the conclusion that the love the couple shared was unique and that the two lovers matched perfectly together. But what happens when two lovers do not belong to the same social class? What happens when they don’t share common things they like? Are they not meant to be? “In love everything is possible”, someone once said. When someone is in love, he/she would make everything that he/she cans to make his/her lover happy and keep him/her by their side forever. F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, depicts a love story in his novel The Great Gatsby and shows how love can change a person. Gatsby, the man from which the story takes its name, fell in love with Daisy when he was young officer just before going to war. As the story goes on, he falls more and more in love with her, but he loses her to a richer man. Gatsby’s love for Daisy
The novel, The Great Gatsby, is a tragic story of lost love. Gatsby and Daisy are two different people in two different worlds. In their time apart, Gatsby was seeking for the American dream while Daisy was enjoying her riches with Tom. Gatsby is one of a few men who possess the knowledge of the true meaning of love. Love is so powerful and beautiful that Gatsby would do anything and everything to make Daisy his wife. However, love is also a mysterious thing that can turn anything from an everlasting relationship to murder. It turns out that Gatsby, a man with the possession of true love, is the one that suffers the most. Gatsby and Daisy, both represent love in their own unique way. Love could be beautiful but also cruel as the same time.
To start off, Gatsby was convinced he was in love with Daisy, however that’s not the case. Jay Gatsby was a twisted man who was obsessed not with Daisy but with the idea of having her. Gatsby’s feelings for Daisy were not genuine; he just loved the crazy notion of having her. She played along with it and made him think that she would leave Tom, but lets face it, it was never going to happen. Daisy did not give a crap about Gatsby and everyone knows it, except for him. Daisy used Gatsby to make her husband jealous because she knew that Gatsby would do anything for her.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a fictional story of a man, Gatsby, whose idealism personified the American dream. Yet, Gatsby’s world transformed when he lost his god-like power and indifference towards the world to fall in love with Daisy. Gatsby’s poverty and Daisy’s beauty, class, and affluence contrasted their mutual affectionate feelings for one another. As Gatsby had not achieved the American dream of wealth and fame yet, he blended into the crowd and had to lie to his love to earn her affections. This divide was caused by the gap in their class structures. Daisy grew up accustomed to marrying for wealth, status, power, and increased affluence, while Gatsby developed under poverty and only knew love as an intense emotional
Nick describes Gatsby as “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life(Ch.3).” Such description unifies the appearance of Gatsby with people’s expectation of a man who accomplished the American dream. The obsession with wealth often blinds people from the potential crisis. The crisis of having everything they worked and struggled for redefined if the reality fails them. Just like strivers who chase the American dream, Gatsby also spent his whole life in pursuit of his American dream, which Daisy was a major component of.
The Great Gatsby presents the main character Jay Gatsby, as a poor man who is in love with his best friends cousin, Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby was in love with Daisy, his first real love. He was impressed with what she represented, great comfort with extravagant living. Gatsby knew he was not good enough for her, but he was deeply in love. “For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s”(Fitzgerald 107). Gatsby could not think of the right words to say. Daisy was too perfect beyond anything he was able to think of. Soon Gatsby and Daisy went their separate ways. Jay Gatsby went into the war while telling Daisy to find someone better for her, someone that will be able to keep her happy and provide for her. Gatsby and Daisy loved one another, but he had to do what was best for her. Gatsby knew the two might not meet again, but if they did, he wanted things to be the same. “I 'm going to fix everything just the way it was before”(Fitzgerald 106). He wanted Daisy to fall in love with him all over again. Unsure if Daisy would ever see Gatsby again, she got married while he was away. The two were still hugely in love with one another, but had to go separate ways in their
In the beginning, Gatsby was a poor army boy who fell in love with a rich girl named Daisy. Knowing from their different circumstances, he could not marry her. So Gatsby left to accumulate a lot of money. Daisy, not being able to wait for Gatsby, marries a rich man named Tom. Tom believes that it is okay for a man to be unfaithful but it is not okay for the woman to be. This caused a lot of conflict in their marriage and caused Daisy to be very unhappy. Gatsby’s dream is to be with Daisy, and since he has accumulated a lot of money, he had his mind set on getting her back. Throughout the novel, Gatsby shows his need to attain The American Dream of love and shows his determination to achieve it. You can tell that Gatsby has a clear vision of what he wants when Nick says, “..he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I gla...
Imagine your aim in life is to win a girl that you’ve waited for years and you are willing to do anything for her. In fact, you’ve done everything in your life that you could have done to impress her. However, due to years of separation she got married with someone else, how would you feel. Would you still love her? In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby has loved Daisy more than he loved himself, even after Daisy got married to Tom Buchanan. Determined to win her back Gatsby devotes himself to the accumulation of wealth, but through her actions Daisy shows that she doesn’t truly love Gatsby.