Essay Summary of Great Gatsby
Wide Awake and Dreaming Hanna Chait T. E. Lawrence stated “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible. ” In The Great Gatsby, the central theme is realizing that creating your own dreams and living in your reality is extremely different.
Myrtle dreamt of having money, yet knew Tom would never leave Daisy, Gatsby dreamt of being with the Daisy he created, but realized she had changed, and Daisy dreamt of being in love and being with Gatsby, but would NEVER leave Tom. Myrtle Wilson desires one thing in life, money. She lives in the valley of ashes, the desolate and barren land that lies between Long Island and New York. She wants nothing more than to become wealthy, leave the valley of ashes, leave her husband, and become a extravagant vapid housewife like she always dreamt of being. ‘I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,’ she said finally. ‘I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe’” Myrtle remarked of her relationship with George. She wanted so badly for him to be something else, someone with class.
She wanted a perfect, wealthy man of high social standing. Myrtle discussed her wedding day to George, “The only crazy I was, was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out. Myrtle was embarrassed and almost disgraced about the fact that George didn’t get married in a suit he bought for himself. Myrtle said she knew right away she made a mistake, so the question was why did she go through with it in the first place? That’s why Myrtle has Tom though: he was her fulfillment, her fortune, though in reality they would never truly be together. Tom was with Daisy and that is how it was going to stay, Tom would never truly love a woman from the valley of ashes. This was known because of the elaborate lie Tom constructed about why he will never leave Daisy because she is a Catholic, when in fact she is not.
Just as Myrtle was creating a false sense of her relationship with Tom, Gatsby was doing the same with Daisy. Jay Gatsby had a dream, his dream was of the Daisy he met and fell in love with five years ago. He dreamt of Daisy admitting that she never loved Tom, that way they would finally have been able to run off together to the life that he once knew. He dreamt of a future, the future he knew they were meant to have from the day he met her. He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you. After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house – just as if it were five years ago. When Gatsby finally had Daisy he realized that there was no longer a dream, he had what he wanted. He soon finds himself asking has my dream changed, or has Daisy changed? Gatsby first noticed this when he had Daisy over, that she was no longer the whimsical 18-year-old Daisy Fay of Louisville, Kentucky that he once knew, that he grew to love.
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams–not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion The magnitude of this realization was that Daisy was not the same Daisy she once was five years ago she had changed. This hurt Gatsby, it woke him up from the fantasy he was living in and showed him that although the love remained the same the girl was no longer the same.
Though Gatsby’s dream of Daisy had existed for the past five years, Daisy’s dream of being with Gatsby had only just been recognized, and she could not decide if it is something she truly wanted or if it was just something to make her happy. She had only just reconnected with Gatsby after five years, at a tea set up by Nick and Gatsby. As Daisy went to say goodbye to Gatsby at the end of the tea, she whispered something in his ear and Gatsby was filled with a rush of emotions. “As watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly.
His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion” (103). This is where the reader begins to see a new Daisy, a Daisy that wanted to be with Gatsby, and had a general need to feel loved. Later on she was forced to identify what her true feelings were about Tom and Gatsby, she was told to state the claim that she never loved Tom, but she found herself only able to say that she no longer loves him, but she DID at one time love him. “’Oh, you want too much! ’ she cried to Gatsby. ‘I love you now — isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past. She began to sob helplessly. ‘I did love him once — but I loved you too. ’” Daisy proclaimed this to Gatsby, as he begged her to admit she never loved Tom, she then proceeded to ask Tom to take her home. Thus ending her dream and Gatsby’s, she wants to be with Gatsby and she wants to be loved, but she knows Tom is the life she is meant to have. Daisy loves her money and her place in society too much to actually feel loved; this is something that will never change. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald delves into a world of dreams and fantasies, as well as vast realizations of what life is really like.
Myrtle wanted nothing more than to live in a society she feels she truly belongs in, and to be wealthy, but deep down as painstaking as it was to admit she knew she could never have Tom. Gatsby wanted to be with the Daisy he knew and loved five years ago, a dreamlike Daisy of 18 years of age, but the Daisy he meets once more has changed. Lastly Daisy wanted nothing but to be loved and be happy, but she knew she loved her money and life too much to let herself be happy. This is how The Great Gatsby shows us how dreams can hurt you much more than the realty you are living in.
