Gatsby fell in love with Daisy. His affection for her is a difficult and complex mystery. What appears, to be a quite authentic love hides beneath its layers an elusive passion. The desire he has towards Daisy is based on an image he has created of her which did not correspond to the actual figure of Daisy. Gatsby loved this image so much that he had no time to think upon whether or not he actually saw her for who she really was. Thus, Gatsby had in front of him a figure which was placed there as an idea. Gatsby placed his mind on his destiny and his existence on Daisy. And yet, there is no such thing, for the most part, as a true truth. All truths appear first as an idea. We never encounter the truth; we only process the "truth" with our
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So let dig into the concept of love in the book showing that the person one’s loves is not truly the individual itself but its image, its projection and the idea someone has created of this person. Let’s take an example outside of the book to illustrate this concept. If someone tells you that they love their father because he raised them, and you find out that their father never actually raised them, do you think that their attachment for their father is actually real? What if, upon the moment that you revealed to them their mistake, their “attachment” stops? Thus, all of us are Gatsby’s. We all have to come to terms with both ourselves and others. We all face the problem of meaningless existence and so we seek to find meaning, if not in ourselves, then -through others. We all have to deal with the problem of existential reality. Gatsby chose to find that meaning in Daisy. She was the one he chose to love. We all have to make choices. Soren Kierkegaard directly explains it when he said, “When it is a duty in loving to love the people we see, then in loving the actual individual person it is important that one does not substitute an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this person should be. The one who does this does not love the person he sees but again something unseen, his own idea or something
So let dig into the concept of love in the book showing that the person one’s loves is not truly the individual itself but its image, its projection and the idea someone has created of this person. Let’s take an example outside of the book to illustrate this concept. If someone tells you that they love their father because he raised them, and you find out that their father never actually raised them, do you think that their attachment for their father is actually real? What if, upon the moment that you revealed to them their mistake, their “attachment” stops? Thus, all of us are Gatsby’s. We all have to come to terms with both ourselves and others. We all face the problem of meaningless existence and so we seek to find meaning, if not in ourselves, then -through others. We all have to deal with the problem of existential reality. Gatsby chose to find that meaning in Daisy. She was the one he chose to love. We all have to make choices. Soren Kierkegaard directly explains it when he said, “When it is a duty in loving to love the people we see, then in loving the actual individual person it is important that one does not substitute an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this person should be. The one who does this does not love the person he sees but again something unseen, his own idea or something