Why Do We Have A Dream In The Great Gatsby

As J.K Rowling once wrote, “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live,” (Rowling, 230), which applies well to Fitzgerald’s thoughts on the subject in The Great Gatsby. Through the character of Jay Gatsby, he illustrates the way a dream taken to an extreme can consume one’s life, rather than giving it meaning. This is what happens to Gatsby over the course of the novel. When faced with seeing Daisy Buchannan after years of hoping “He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock” (Fitzgerald, 92), his dream had played out so often in his mind that the fact that it is happening is such a rush that it is overwhelming, and he is struggling to keep calm. Dreams such as that can become anxiety inducing, especially going to the lengths that Gatsby does to make them reality. To some degree he does understand that reality cannot live up to fantasy, and once he composed himself upon reuniting with Daisy, “He

Gatsby truly saw the world once he realized he could not have Daisy, including ugliness where there was none before. The end of the quotation adds a morbid sense of finality to the ends of dreams, as they roam the same space as the dead. In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald shows how wealthy people will tend to hide behind their money as a way to escape responsibility for their actions. Daisy and Tom Buchannan are prime examples; they come from old money and “they [smash] up things and creatures and then [retreat] back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (149), and they are allowed to do so simply because they are rich, and their wealth doubles as social power and