In some cases, yearning after a girl, and reinventing yourself for her may be seen as romantic and heroic, but in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby is just pitiful. He plays everyone into his own fantasy because he can never accept reality or his own past. Manipulating friends, lying your way into success and committing crimes does not describe a hero. On the counter, tragic can be described as pathetic, disastrous, or fatal, and Gatsby is the epitome of tragic. Jay Gatsby is a tragic character because he wants someone that he can’t have, longs to be apart of a society that he doesn’t belong in, and takes the blame, eventually dying, for a girl who doesn’t love him. Gatsby pines for Daisy’s love for 5 years, but she will
…show more content…
Gatsby may want to transform himself for a noble cause, wanting to better himself, but he goes about it in a completely unethical way. He lies and breaks laws trying match Daisy’s high society and wealth class. Instead of getting educated and making an honest living, impressing his peers, he uses shady tactics to make quick money. Tom Buchanan exposes Gatsby’s side jobs when he says, “He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold gain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong ”(Fitzgerald 133). His economic status wasn’t good enough for Daisy 5 years prior, and even breaking laws to become wealthy, he still can’t live up to her standards. Everyone in East Egg comes from generously wealthy backgrounds of very solid social statuses, so from the start, Gatsby was at a disadvantage. Jay can never compete for Daisy because he’s not like Tom, or even “Gatsby” at all, he is James Gatz, and James Gatz can never fit into Daisy’s image of perfection. On page 98, Nick recounts, “James Gatz – that was really, or legally, his last name… I suppose he’d had that name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all”. Gatsby has lead everyone to believe that he had the same upbringing as them, in order to be socially accepted. As courageous as it may be to transform to a better lifestyle, Gatsby overlooks that he can’t change the past. He will always be from a small farm in North Dakota, and no amount of lies can change his background. No matter the amount of lies he creates, he can never compete with a man like Tom Buchanan of East Egg. Gatsby is a tragedy because he fiercely wants to be someone he is not. He breaks the law and creates an entirely
Gatsby may want to transform himself for a noble cause, wanting to better himself, but he goes about it in a completely unethical way. He lies and breaks laws trying match Daisy’s high society and wealth class. Instead of getting educated and making an honest living, impressing his peers, he uses shady tactics to make quick money. Tom Buchanan exposes Gatsby’s side jobs when he says, “He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold gain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong ”(Fitzgerald 133). His economic status wasn’t good enough for Daisy 5 years prior, and even breaking laws to become wealthy, he still can’t live up to her standards. Everyone in East Egg comes from generously wealthy backgrounds of very solid social statuses, so from the start, Gatsby was at a disadvantage. Jay can never compete for Daisy because he’s not like Tom, or even “Gatsby” at all, he is James Gatz, and James Gatz can never fit into Daisy’s image of perfection. On page 98, Nick recounts, “James Gatz – that was really, or legally, his last name… I suppose he’d had that name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all”. Gatsby has lead everyone to believe that he had the same upbringing as them, in order to be socially accepted. As courageous as it may be to transform to a better lifestyle, Gatsby overlooks that he can’t change the past. He will always be from a small farm in North Dakota, and no amount of lies can change his background. No matter the amount of lies he creates, he can never compete with a man like Tom Buchanan of East Egg. Gatsby is a tragedy because he fiercely wants to be someone he is not. He breaks the law and creates an entirely