Who Is Daisy Responsible For The Downfall Of Jay Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman, characters who strive to be garner acceptance from people in their lives who they trust or respect despite these people's negative influences on them find themselves damaged or disillusioned with the false identity they have tried to make for themselves. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, who has been haunted throughout his five years separated from the love of his life, Daisy, by the notion that a wealthy girl such as herself could never marry a man of his lower economic background, works tirelessly to reinvent himself as a man of wealth and class. Going so far as to buy a mansion “so that Daisy would be just across the bay,” “read[ing] a Chicago paper for years on the chance of catching a glimpse

of Daisy’s name,” and throwing lavish parties “expect[ing] her to wander into one,” the wildly obsessive nature of Gatsby’s infatuation with Daisy is apparent and is almost unsettling. This disturbing preoccupation with attracting the attention of Daisey is revealing of the great deal of importance that Gatsby places on Daisy’s approval, a fact that will ultimately serve as Gatsby’s downfall as he will find himself unsatisfied and disillusioned with the unrealistically ideal relationship he seeks and the identity he has created for himself.

A reality which is immediately apparent when Gatsby who has held Daisy on such a high pedestal and worked so hard to reinvent himself to fit into her social circle is finally reacquainted with Daisy. Despite being intoxicated with his misguided notion that he can, “fix everything just the way it was before,” Gatsby finds that “Daisy tumbled short of his dreams not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.” Like Gatsby, Happy Loman falls victim to inherited expectations for a complete

person. In Death of a Salesman, Happy’s respect for his father, Willy, blinds him to the negative influence that he has on him. Just as Willy has embellished his wealth and treated women as trophies throughout his life, Happy gages his success and worth in life by the amount wealth he has amassed and number of women he has conquered. Happy recognizes that these frivolous things leave him empty, saying “it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, plenty of women, and goddamnit, I’m lonely.” And yet when later confronted by his brother, Biff, who questions his brothers honesty and perverted morals saying, “You big blow, are you the assistant buyer? You’re one of the assistants to the assistant, aren’t you?” Biff exposes how deeply he has bought into his father’s dishonest, materialistic ideals as he maintains, “Well, I’m practically —.” Even in the face of his brother questioning his integrity, Happy shows that the great regard he has for his father has left him in denial of the gross dysfunction that exists in the idea of a complete person that he has inherited from him. Similarly, just as Gatsby remains convinced of his ability to recreate what he had with Daisy and committed to the identity he has created for himself, Happy remains committed to the unfulfilled life he has created for himself. Even after his father is driven to suicide by his delusions of unfulfilled success and admiration, Happy remains committed to the ideals that his father instilled in him maintaining, “He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have—to come out number-one man… this is where i’m gonna win it for him.” While Gatsby’s quest to become a person he believes Daisy can love and Happy’s mimicking of the twisted values of the father he respects so much both shape these character’s ideas of who they should be in different ways, both stem from the great amount of value that these characters place in the approval of people they respect. Appropriately, both Gatsby and Happy experience similar heartbreak and disillusionment when their models of personal perfection are exposed as less than perfect. However, it is not only respected individuals who hold this power over people; it can be seen that the pressures of society to meet expectations for who a person should be often have similarly debilitating effects.
In Invisible Man and As I Lay Dying, characters are blinded by their perceived importance In Invisible Man, the narrator, who is plagued by a fragile sense of identity, falls victim to society’s preconceived notions of an upstanding member of society and allows himself to be shaped by these preconceived notions as he fights to escape racist stereotypes of black men in society.

During his long reflection on identity during the prologue to Invisible Man, the narrator introduces his fragile sense of identity and self worth saying, “you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds… You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world,... and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you.” While the narrator states that he feels the need “to convince yourself that you exist in the real world,” the conclusion to this quotation which expresses a desire “to make them recognize you” is revealing of the fact that the narrator truly seeks validation of self in how he is perceived by society. This identification of where the narrator seeks validation frames up the narrator’s quest for approval as he lives his life seeking the validation of society, a journey made even more difficult by the fact that the narrator feels as though he needs to break away from the racist stereotypes that plague his society. The narrator’s desire for societal validation is evident later

in the novel as he desperately seeks the approval of the embodiment of racist, upper class whites through his school’s white benefactor, Mr. Norton. Speaking on poor, uneducated black people who the narrator and Mr. Norton had just encountered, the narrator says, “I wanted to stop the car and talk with Mr. Norton, to beg his pardon for what he had seen; to plead and show him tears,... like those of a child before his parent… I hated them,... poor, ignorant people.” The powerful language used here is revealing of how deeply rooted the narrator’s desire for societal validation is as Ellison portrays the narrator as a child begging for the approval of his parent, the white upper class serving as the narrator’s parent similar to how Happy’s seeks for the approval of his father. And just as Death of Salesman’s Happy is left empty and permanently damaged by his quest to fulfil his expectations for personal fulfillment, Invisible Man’s narrator finds that trying to be the individual that society has pushed him to become ultimately leaves him hurt and without a true sense of self. After countless attempts to escape his black identity and fit in with what different sectors of society deem respectable for a black man, the narrator is left disillusioned and without an identity of his own, concluding that, “I couldn’t return… to any part of my old life. I could approach it only from the outside.” Similarly, As I Lay Dying’s Anse Bundren allows himself to be shaped by his society’s perceptions of what a respectable person should look and act like. Despite maintaining that he is an “honest, hardworking man” and that “It takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off of them that sweats” (a deeply ironic statement given that Anse tells people that “if he ever sweats, he will die”), Anse is later shown to be envious of the respect that the more refined people of the towns garner and strives to present himself as more sophisticated than he truly is. Anse’s desire to distance himself from the “hillbilly” stigma that surrounds him is apparent throughout the novel. When his family prepares to take their deceased mother, Addie, into town for her burial (a task which Anse uses as an excuse to go to town to buy new false teeth for himself), Anse dresses far nicer than usual. Vardaman accounts Anse’s appearance saying, “He has shaved, but not good. There is a long cut on his jaw, and he is wearing his Sunday pants and a white shirt with the neckband buttoned.” Despite shaving and putting on his nice clothes, the reality of who Anse truly is remains inescapable, apparent as even his attempt at shaving is “not good” and reveals “a long cut on his jaw;” just as Anse’s bid to look more refined was likely even more revealing of his back country roots. While Anse’s attempts at appearing more refined are not inherently wrong, just as the characters of Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman, and Invisible Man hurt themselves by allowing themselves to be negatively influenced by others, Anse’s effort to meet standards of refinement in his society hurt him and his family. Anse allows his family to undergo treacherous conditions, takes money from his daughter Dewey Dell, forces his son Jewel to sell his horse, and steals from his unconscious son Cash so that he can make it to the town of Jefferson to buy false teeth under the guise of looking to fulfill his unloving wife’s wish to be buried there. Anse’s desire to appear more refined by acquiring new false teeth blinds him to the selfishness and negligence of his actions as he sits idly by while his family is torn apart. Both Anse and the narrator of Invisible Man allow themselves to be blinded by their inflated desire to be accepted by society drive them to severely damage themselves.