Since Tom and Daisy are chasing a memory, they have no expectations for the future, but, living solely on the basis of a dream, Gatsby has extreme hopes for the upcoming years. Without his dream, Gatsby has no future and is forced to die, but, in their future, Tom and Daisy are forced to drift from place to place, dying with each move. Moving to another location is similar to experiencing a death because Tom and Daisy end their previous engagements when they begin anew in another area. The feelings that Tom and Daisy are trying to find exist in the mind from experience; therefore, these feelings lack the unique loveliness of something created from the human imagination. Altogether, "[. . .] the characters [. . .] have the wistful sense of a past [. . .] to be recaptured" (Stern 204). Gatsby’s dream cannot be achieved, and Tom and Daisy’s feeling from their memory cannot be felt again with the same initial excellence because of their position in time.
Through Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s conflict with time, the destruction of Gatsby’s underlying dream is illuminated because a dream has no hope of developing into a reality. Time holds all truths and changes all things, so nothing remains constant except the human ability to dream. Even though a dream cannot be obtained with the same level of