The Role Of Dreams In The Great Gatsby

Sometimes it is difficult to get up in the morning, not always because being in bed is so comfortable, but maybe because we know our dreams and reality are so different. Dreams are also described as self-deluding fantasies in which some people cannot differentiate between imagination and real-life. In the novel The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby falls in love with a woman who was not strong enough to wait for his return after World War I. She ended up marrying a man, named Tom Buchanan who was just as careless as she was. This woman was Daisy Buchanan. Daisy portrayed a character who was torn between her husband and her former lover. To Gatsby, marrying Daisy would give him the ability to fulfill the American Dream, moving up in social class. Harold Bloom notes in his critical article on The Great Gatsby, “Whatever the American Dream has become, its truest representation remains Jay Gatsby.” (5) Overall, in …show more content…
Gatsby had told Daisy about the green light, on her dock, that he can see across the Bay at night. After Gatsby told this to Daisy, who had no clue there ever was a light on her dock, Nick was standing nearby wondering if “Possibly it had occurred to [Gatsby] that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever” (Fitzgerald 93). The green light was not only a light that showed Gatsby the location of Daisy’s house under the moonlit Bay, but it also symbolized Gatsby’s hopes and dreams of being with Daisy in the future. “Now it was again a green light on a dock. [Gatsby’s] count of enchanted objects had diminished by one” (Fitzgerald 93). As Gatsby slowly comes to a realization of his surroundings and the truths that behold him, the objects he uses to represent his future begin to diminish. Therefore, Jay Gatsby is essentially a romantic idealist who is destroyed by his inability to accept reality due to his abundance of romantic