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In the 1920s, social class and material affluence controlled every aspect of an individual's life, especially love. When a person is in love, they will go to great extents to please the one they love. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts many characters who struggled to find their identity and who they wanted to be. In the novel, Jay Gatsby spent his whole life reinventing himself, creating a new identity to fabricate his poverty-filled past so he could be apart of Daisy’s world.
Gatsby’s desire and motivation to be wealthy centered around his unattainable dream of being reunited with Daisy. He believed he could escape his poor, low-status past life if he acquired enough wealth and possessions.
Daisy has enough wealth to buy her whatever she wants, however, her life lacks importance and purpose. To appeal to her materialistic personality, Gatsby would host extravagant and costly parties “stocked with gins and liquors and cordials,” “buffet tables garnished with glistening hors d’œvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold” (40).
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Gatsby made sure his parties had the best of everything hoping one day Daisy would wander into one of his parties, impressed by his wealth and enormous house.
Gatsby claimed Daisy never loved Tom, and TOm exposed Gatsby’s true identity as a bootlegger declaring Daisy would never leave him, especially “not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he puts on her finger (133).
As the argument continues Daisy begins “drawing further and further into herself.” Gatsby never realized no matter how much wealth and material possessions he had, he could never be equal with toM and Daisy’s social class because of how he gained his money. His hope of being reunited with Daisy ended shortly because Daisy would never have sacrificed her social standing for a man who could never be her equal.
Gatsby was a man who had no firm grip on reality, he believed he could repeat the past. He desperately wanted to overcome the inability to repeat the past, “he wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to tOm and say ‘I never loved you.’... after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house - just as if it were five years ago” (109). Gatsby didn’t love Daisy as she was now, he was in love with a memory of their younger selves. He also never took into consideration the personal changes that might have occurred within the five years of them being apart. When he stated, “ ‘Can’t repeat the past?... Why of course you can!’ “ (110) He did not think of how the both of them have changed.
Daisy is now married and has a child, Gatsby was involved in illegalities, and he had dedicated his life-altering himself into someone he thought Daisy wanted him to be and made himself into someone of her social class. Perhaps she loved only loved him for the short amount of time before his death because she thought he was the same man she used to know. From the moment Gatsby lost Daisy, she became the main focal point of his desire to become wealthy, so that he might be accepted as one from a higher social standing. Gatsby denied the inevitable, that his dream was only a fanciful illusion. Even before George Wilson pulled the trigger, Gatsby’s dream of being reunited with Daisy had already died.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald. (2021, Aug 09). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-great-gatsby-f-scott-fitzgerald-essay
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