How Does Love Exist In The Great Gatsby

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Love doesn’t truly exist, at least, not according to F. Scott Fitzgerald. He and his wife had a tumultuous relationship at best filled with alcoholism, mental illness, and infidelity all ending with his wife in a mental facility and him, an alcoholic. Not a great relationship to base your idea of love on, but hey, it makes for a great book. His novel, The Great Gatsby, reflects Fitzgerald’s belief that love cannot exist because it is driven by lust, status, and fantasy. The characters from the love triangle in the novel each exemplify one of these temptations, Tom being lust, Gatsby being fantasy, and Daisy being convention through their relationships with each other and others. Tom Buchanan finds himself needing the lust that is no longer provided in his marriage so he turns to …show more content…

Not once does he consider what Daisy wants, he even forces her to say she never loved Tom to feed into his delusions, so when she says she loves both men he repeats in disbelief “You loved me too”(132). In Gatsby’s fantasy, it was only him and Daisy. But that doesn’t pan out in the real world because his illusion doesn’t consider reality. He doesn’t care about the major obstacles between him and Daisy, he’s too busy being blinded by what they had in the past and his hope of bringing that back. Gatsby’s strong hope for love suggests Fitzgerald does believe in the idea of love, but not in the existence of it. Daisy’s life reflects society's value on wealth and class as she’s forced to marry Tom for his status and becomes a victim of convention and eventually conforms. Before her wedding to Tom, she had a breakdown, refusing to go through with it when she could no longer have second thoughts because “the pearls were around her neck and the incident was

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