According to Aristotle, a tragic hero must be noble, be flawed, and must have suffered a reversal of fortune. In The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the reader painfully follows the main character, Jay Gatsby, as he gets thrown into each of these steps. As the novel progresses, Gatsby also gains sympathy by showing the audience his romantic side as he falls deeply in love with Daisy. At the end of the novel, he is forced to meet his ultimate downfall. However, his cataclysmic ending should not simply sadden the reader, but teach him or her a life lesson. Jay Gatsby is a tragic hero who portrays the corruption of the American dream through his tragic flaw. It is this very flaw that leads him to his ultimate downfall, which is the final
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This characteristic manifests in Gatsby’s obstructed view of the world due to his own naive idealism. The reader is exposed to his idealistic views when Daisy and Nick are at his house and Nick reflects on the events of the afternoon. Even Nick, who has always defended Gatsby, realizes that “Daisy must have fallen short of Gatsby’s dreams一not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion” (101). Gatsby met Daisy five years prior. She was a girl with wealth, with connections, she embodied everything a seventeen-year-old boy would hope to have one day. Instead of falling in love with Daisy, he falls in love with this illusion and he dedicates his life to becoming a man that could be equal to Daisy in both wealth and social status. His ambitions blind him to the point where he does not see things as they really are and expects them to play out exactly as he thinks they will. Over the past five years Gatsby has planned out his life with Daisy. He sincerely believes that he can “relive the past” (116). However, this ‘past’ that him and Daisy shared together did not include ex-lovers or children from men other than him. This blatant disregard for reality fuels his tragic flaw of idealism and blinds him to the fact that his ideal life is
This characteristic manifests in Gatsby’s obstructed view of the world due to his own naive idealism. The reader is exposed to his idealistic views when Daisy and Nick are at his house and Nick reflects on the events of the afternoon. Even Nick, who has always defended Gatsby, realizes that “Daisy must have fallen short of Gatsby’s dreams一not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion” (101). Gatsby met Daisy five years prior. She was a girl with wealth, with connections, she embodied everything a seventeen-year-old boy would hope to have one day. Instead of falling in love with Daisy, he falls in love with this illusion and he dedicates his life to becoming a man that could be equal to Daisy in both wealth and social status. His ambitions blind him to the point where he does not see things as they really are and expects them to play out exactly as he thinks they will. Over the past five years Gatsby has planned out his life with Daisy. He sincerely believes that he can “relive the past” (116). However, this ‘past’ that him and Daisy shared together did not include ex-lovers or children from men other than him. This blatant disregard for reality fuels his tragic flaw of idealism and blinds him to the fact that his ideal life is