The Great Gatsby Reality

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Although the Roaring Twenties were undoubtedly wild, provocative, and thrilling, not everyone who lived through them experienced the same euphoric feeling that is often associated with the time. For instance, in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there were people like Jay Gatsby who did not endure the full exciting roar. Despite multiple parties that attracted hundreds of people from all over New York, Gatsby never felt like his vision was fulfilled. Although he was a man who went from rags to riches, he sometimes refused to face reality, which ended up getting him killed. Jay Gatsby, although living a fabulous life, was caught in an illusion that ultimately ended up destroying him. Gatsby believed that he was a god who could create …show more content…
This is shown when he purchased a mansion in New York, threw extravagant parties, and devoted his life to being near Daisy. People from all across New York, status and class disregarded, flooded his house during the parties; it was all worth it when Daisy walked through the doors. He anticipated that once his lover reached his house, she would see the extravagance and extreme hard work, appreciate it, and leave Tom. “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” (Fitzgerald 109). Gatsby not only tried to lure her into his marvelous parties, but also he imagined a life where Daisy says she never loved Tom. His optimistic vision is squandered when she tumbled short of his dreams, not through her own fault, but because Gatsby could not grasp that the past is not able to be repeated. His unrealistic ambition and aspiration is countered by the reality that Daisy is a mother and wife who used to love Tom. Gatsby is not able to see past his own desires and dream and does not accept the fact that the past is not mutable. Gatsby, tenacious with his passion, failed to break reality due to the past that he cannot …show more content…
Finally in his last moments, he was no longer absorbed into his efforts to create his perfect fantasy. He had given up on receiving a phone call from Daisy saying she wanted to be with him and no longer cared. “If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real”(161). It is represented in the passage that he must have realized his dreams were gone when he did not hear from Daisy. He had no choice and threw away all of the parts of him that still cared about his dream because he had lost hope. Gatsby’s illusions ultimately costs him his life because he took the blame for the death of Myrtle and covered his lover. Gatsby paid a high price for living his life through one
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