Synthesis Essay: The Great Gatsby

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Gatsby Synthesis Essay The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, represents the theme that the American dream is no longer achievable. Happiness eludes those who only want more because as new things arise the temptation is always there, to be one step ahead of everyone else and have it all. Jay Gatsby represents the constant striving to capture something that a person believes will finally make them happy. He wants Daisy, his love from long ago that was supposed to wait for him. However, she was swept away by another man, Tom, who had money and flaunted it extravagantly. Gatsby couldn’t be with Daisy because he was a poor boy and she was a rich girl who didn’t quite show compassion to those beneath her. Therefore, Gatsby set out to become …show more content…
Tom, however, will not let Daisy go and reprimands her for having an affair while he was having one of his own. Through their lives though, Gatsby, and Daisy, and Tom never truly achieved the happiness they desired because they always wanted something more, the fatal flaw of the American dream. Daisy and Tom both grew up very wealthy, never having to feel the effects of struggle or poverty. This caused them to lack compassion for those supposably “beneath” them and they lived in a fantasy world full of fake happiness that they created for themselves. “For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes,” (Source A). This quote shows how Daisy lives in a fake, fragile world that she believes to be full of happiness but she is only truly sad because she’s always been handed everything and always wants more. Tom and Daisy both have affairs, because their marriage has bored them and they want something new and different. They believe that they can each have affairs because they’ve always been able to do whatever they want and so they don’t find any harm in having an affair. …show more content…
He wanted this life for a girl, not for himself. He wanted Daisy, but his elegant lifestyle enamored the narrator, Nick Carraway, and Nick’s close knowledge of Gatsby’s life led him to question Gatsby’s seemingly great life, ¨there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life…. -[he] was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men” (Source A). This quote shows how Gatsby’s life enamored many until they saw his sadness and that with all he had, he still wasn’t happy. He was lonely and his sorrows were that of wanting Daisy, the person he had built his whole extravagant life for. She was also the cause of his death. His want for Daisy, drove him to have an affair with her. Tom avenged the affair by lying to the husband of his own affair and telling him that it was Gatsby and not himself. The husband then killed Gatsby. His constant need for Daisy to finally fulfill his life led him to an untimely death and he died a sad man who never completed his dream. He had reached his dream but a

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