Gatsby

Trevor Cook
Mrs.Cottriel
Eng.3 per.4
19 March, 2013
Gatsby’s Journey
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a novel that best signifies America in the 1920s. In this novel, the narrator, Nick Carroway, helps his friend Jay Gatsby reunite with the love of his life, which he has been in love with for the past five years. The affair between Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby fails and unfortunately ends in Gatsby being shot and killed. These events were so surreal due to Gatsby’s vision and goals and eventually becoming his reality, but unfortunately couldn’t cope with the reality when it came crashing down on him. Gatsby’s success in the beginning of the novel starts off with his false portrayal of perseverance to make a difference in this world. With the cover up of the illegal bootlegging, Gatsby is shown in his persistent need to show off his successful ways of earning money. For example, Nick says, “there was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and women came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” (Fitzgerald 31). Gatsby demonstrates his compulsive need to show his success, riches, and extravagances in and to the city of New York. In the literary criticism, written by Thomson Gale, the author strongly expresses the “echoes of the American dream pervade the novel which contrasts the supposed innocents and moral sense of the western egg” (Pavlovski 133). This portrayal of the American dream through Fitzgerald’s gaudy perception is a distortion of the truth and moral values that benefit us. Jay Gatsby finally reaches his final goal of catching Daisy’s interest in him. Unfortunately Gatsby and Daisy do not live up to the expectations they are being held to. Jay’s distinct view of life around him twists his perspective of reality. He sees Daisy in a different way instead of just as another grown woman and links her beautiful personality and unique ways with his problems and successes such as money and power. Gatsby states, “Her voice is full of money. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money…” (Fitzgerald 99). This observation of Daisy makes Fitzgerald’s audience question Jay Gatsby’s affection and honesty towards Daisy by misleading her character in the novel. The literary criticism, The Great Gatsby written by Ronald Berman, states that “Gatsby remains innocent in his single-minded pursuit of Daisy despite his associations with underworld character and ill-begotten money” (Berman 113). Jay’s determination to get Daisy alters his reality and eventually his morals and judgments. With Jay being distracted by Daisy’s beauty, his search for his American dream finally came crashing down eventually leading to his ultimate downfall. Gatsby soon finds himself in dilemma of jealousy which leads himself to his death in the novel. Due to Jay’s death his goal of his American dream disappears. Carroway describes his eternal memory of Jay’s righteousness to him. Carroway says: I t’s vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had pandered in whispers to the last and greatest to all human dreams; for a long transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder (182) Gatsby’s view of possibility and love is gone forever due to his exploitation of love within his own dream. In the criticism, written by Morton, he explains that Gatsby’s “dream is based on hollow underpinnings, on the vacuous daisy and the misguided concept that large amounts of money can be made and used without responsibility” (Morton 2). This explains the overall downfall of Jay Gatsby due to his obsession for Daisy as well as money. In Scott Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby gets so caught up with his visions and goals in making his ultimate American dream that he is unable to maintain a healthy relationship with the love of his life Daisy. When reality came crashing down on him he was eternally frozen and could not cope with it all leading to his violent death.

Prigozy, Ruth. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. N. pag. Print. Bloom, Harold. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. New York: Chelsea House, 1999. Print.