The Great Gatsby Quote Analysis

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Paralyzed by the Past: Would you repeat your past? While it might sound nice to relive the past, it doesn’t turn out the way one hopes. The past has already happened for a reason, but one doesn’t always get to know why. Time can’t be stopped and trying to recreate the past means one is wasting limited time in the present. Eventually, time runs out and can’t be gained; time is valuable. However, in The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby was willing to take the risk of sailing upstream to the past to rekindle his love for Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby was madly in love with Daisy even though they spent five years apart. After fighting in the Great War, Gatsby discovered Daisy lived on Long Island, so he settled down in a house right across the water from her. …show more content…

Gatsby was enthralled with recreating his relationship with Daisy and doing all the things he regretted not doing the first time. However, he recognized Daisy had a new future without him, so he told Nick, “He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’ After she had obliterated four years with that sentence, they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. just as if it were five years ago” (Fitzgerald 109). Gatsby believed if Tom was out of the picture, then he and Daisy could be happy together. He continuously tried to rekindle a love that was now one-sided. Daisy also loved Gatsby’s sums of money and not Gatsby himself. He had much deeper feelings for her than she did for him. He didn’t realize his wishful thinking was trapping him in the past. Toward the end of the book, the symbols of a clock and swimming upstream in water were metaphors of time running out for Gatsby, and reliving the past was nearly impossible. When Nick was able to get Daisy to Gatsby’s house to hang out, Gatsby was very nervous and didn’t know how to talk to Daisy since he was haunted by his past and didn’t want to mess up like he did

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