Great Essays (2054 words) - The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby

Great Gatsby Themes In The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, many themes are enclosed; the most salient of these themes is related to the American Dream. The American Dream is based on the idea that any person, no matter what they are, can become successful in life by his or her hard work. The dream also embodies the idea of a self-sufficient person, an entrepreneur making it successful for themselves. The Great Gatsby is about what happened to the American Dream during the 1920s, an era when the dream had been corrupted by the relentless pursuit of wealth. In this novel, the pursuit of the American Dream and the pursuit of a romantic dream are the ultimate causes of the downfall of the book's title character, Jay Gatsby. Throughout the story, Jay Gatsby avoids telling the truth of his hard, unglamorous childhood. He does this to keep his superficial image of himself and to save himself from the embarrassment of being in a state of poverty during his youth. His parents were lazy and unsuccessful people who worked on the farm, and because of this Gatsby never really accepted them as his parents. Jay Gatsby's real name is James Gatz and he is from the very unexciting North Dakota. He changed his name to Jay Gatsby when he was seventeen years old, which was the beginning of his version of the American Dream. In all realities Gatsby arose from his Platonic view of himself, the idealistic self-view that a seventeen year old boy has of himself (Fitzgerald 104). Though concealed for most of the story, Gatsby's embarrassing childhood is a major source of determination in his attempt to achieve the American Dream. During Gatsby's early adulthood, he joined the army. He first met Daisy when he was at Camp Taylor and he and some other officers stopped by her house. He initially loved Daisy because of her extraordinary house and because many other men had been with her already. One evening in October, during 1917, Gatsby fell in love with Daisy Fay, and in turn she fell in love with Gatsby. "Daisy was the first ?nice' girl that he had ever known" (Fitzgerald 155). Their love was an uneasy one at first for Gatsby to comprehend because he wasn't rich by any standards and he felt that he wasn't worthy of Daisy's affection, but his uneasiness was uplifted when he and Daisy fell in love and when he found out that Daisy knew a lot because he knew a variety of things that she didn't. Their month of love was physically ended when Gatsby had to go to war, but their emotional love never ended. As Gatsby performed brilliantly throughout the war, they wrote each other frequently. Daisy couldn't understand why Gatsby couldn't come home. She wanted her love to be their with her, she needed some assurance that she was doing the right thing. It didn't take long for Daisy to get over Jay because in the Spring of 1918 she fell in love with a rich, former All-American college football player named Tom Buchanon. This broke Jay Gatsby's heart. His love for Daisy was a strong one and he was determined to get her back. This first love with Daisy had a great impact on his idea of one of the aspects of achieving the American Dream. Throughout the novel, the reader is mislead about how Gatsby became wealthy. Gatsby claims on several different occasions that he inherited his parents' immense fortune. This is a story that Gatsby made up in order to keep his self-image up by not letting people know about his childhood. The truth is that Gatsby got rich by illegal measures. He was friends with the notorious Meyer Wolfsheim. Meyer Wolfsheim was the racketeer who supposedly fixed the World Series of 1919. He was Gatsby's connection to organized crime, in which Gatsby became rich. Gatsby's true sources to richness were selling bootleg liquor in his chain of drug stores and creating a giant business to get rid of and sell stolen Liberty bonds (Mizener 188). Gatsby's methods of gaining wealth corrupt the morality of the American Dream although they help him to achieve it. It did not take long for Gatsby to attempt to win Daisy back after he returned from the army. Jay Gatsby had this romantic view of Daisy and himself together and happy forever. He felt the best way to achieve this idea would be for him to become at least as rich as Daisy's husband Tom Buchanon.