Essay On Dreams In The Great Gatsby

The Great Dream

Dreams can be a way of escaping reality. Dreams enable a motivating force that leads one to pursue unrealistic aspirations. Dreams distort and manipulate the world’s circumstances. They can be ever elusive and misleading; in turn leading one down the path of personal destruction and regret. Jay Gatsby has a dream. His romantic dream is not only “naïve, gaudy, and unattainable,” but also leads to his demise (Ornstein 34). Initially, F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays Gatsby’s dream of recapturing Daisy’s love as attainable and probable, however he later reveals that Gatsby’s dream will, in reality, not be realized. As the novel progresses, Fitzgerald reveals how consumed Gatsby really is when it comes to reviving his relationship

“Like his romantic dream, Jay Gatsby belongs to a vanished past” in which he must now create a new image of himself (Ornstein 37). Gatsby was a “penniless young man” while Daisy was a “nice girl… in her rich, full life…”(Fitzgerald 149). There was that “indiscernible barbed wire between [Jay and Daisy]” which would have separated them if Jay had not deceived her into his “rich, full life” (Fitzgerald 148-149). “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself...” which led to inventing “just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” (Fitzgerald 98). Jimmy Gatz inherited a dream for personal success in which, “he is the impresario, the creator, not the enjoyer of a riotous venture dedicated to an impossible goal” (Ornstein 38). Gatz had only imagined becoming rich and successful and it would “haunt him in his bed at night.” (Fitzgerald 99). Gatsby shared with Nick the following

In wanting to receive her love, he was willing to tell her anything even if it was all a lie. As Gatsby put it, “what was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?” (Fitzgerald 150). Gatsby had an ideal image that he needed to accomplish in order for Daisy to truly love him. Once he discovered that Daisy had married Tom, that news was the trigger that set Gatsby off into his dream of recapturing Daisy. The “great dream” of capturing Daisy had taken over and Gatsby would not stop until he has accomplished the dream. Somehow, Gatsby realized that the only way of winning Daisy back was actually living up to the image he had told her, which was the image of “what he was going to do” (Fitzgerald 150). He promised that he was “the farm boy who reinvents himself as Jay Gatsby, who ‘sprang from a Platonic conception of himself’” and since he had gained the appropriate lifestyle for Daisy, it was time to win back her heart