Preview

Daisy's Sightlessness In The Great Gatsby

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1940 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Daisy's Sightlessness In The Great Gatsby
It is every writer's aspiration to write a literary work as deep and profound as F. Scott Fitzgerald has in his masterpiece The Great Gatsby. The novel alludes to an innumerable variety of themes; encompassing all of the symbolism, metaphorical traits, and masterful writing that an English teacher's favorite should have. In a novel of this caliber it is expected that there are many deep and well-developed characters. This book has them in spades. From all of the wide variety of characters portrayed in this novel, Jay Gatsby is clearly the most vital and interesting; the course of events in The Great Gatsby are clearly centered around him.
Gatsby's behavior in the story can be summed up concisely in the word delusional. While his intentions
…show more content…
Although it is a sure sign of emotional instability, he knows Daisy is attracted to money. "‘She's got an indiscreet voice,' I remarked. ‘It's full of — 'I hesitated. ‘Her voice is full of money,' [Gatsby] said suddenly" (Fitzgerald 127). Gatsby goes to any lengths to make himself "worthy" of Daisy. He involves himself with the Mafia, and with organized crime, making himself enormous sums of wealth. However, this is not honest money, and unlike his outward appearance, he is not living the "American Dream", as it were. The festivities, the extravagant house, and the gleaming automobiles are in fact all lies in the sense that they were bought with dishonesty. This is yet another testament to how Gatsby is hopelessly fixated on Daisy, causing him to make decisions based on whether it will bring her nearer to him. Gatsby's obsession with tangible things is one of many indicators of his reckless desire to astound people in any way …show more content…
He dresses in flashy, eye-catching clothing, with colors that scream, "Notice me!" He has a particular affinity for white; when he first reunites with Daisy he wears a white suit with a silver shirt and gold tie. The color white implies purity and vitality, which is the image Gatsby is trying to give off, because of his delusion that Daisy herself is pure. Even Gatsby's car has a meaningful color – being yellow, it is the color of corruption and dishonesty – a symbol of how the car was purchased in the first place. To take it even further, automobiles are one of the focal points of the so-called American dream in the 1920's: fast, sleek and fashionable. The yellow in the car suggests that the American dream in itself is in fact a lie, prone to corruption and dishonesty as is anything

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The mystery behind Jay Gatsby allows for him to become one of the most intriguing members of the upper class. As Gatsby’s background unravels, it becomes clear that Fitzgerald chose Jay Gatsby as the main character because he defies every social normality in the 1920’s. By Fitzgerald’s writing, the reader realizes that Gatsby’s mindset separates him from others. Everything Gatsby has accomplished in the past five years is because of his dedication, ambition, and integrity in following in his dreams which Fitzgerald greatly admires. The social class one is born into is the one they belong to their entire life, unless you are Jay Gatsby. Although Gatsby attempts to convince people that his entire life has consisted of lavish and wealthy things,…

    • 257 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Great Gatsby was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is perhaps one of the most recognized authors associated with the literary flowering of the 1920’s in America. The concern of most authors during this time was of the materialism that had suddenly swept the country. Credit was easy, interest rates were low, and corruption abounded. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald portrays how the American dream of success was extinguished until it was nothing more than greedy desire. The sanguine American dream that had turned no one away and had given all an equal opportunity for happiness and success was no longer. Through use of his main character, Jay Gatsby,…

    • 884 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The high society of the twenties is best portrayed by Daisy Buchanan. Daisy has beauty and charm, but underneath all of that, corruption turned her to extreme selfishness and materialism. She represents the time period that “The Great Gatsby” took place because she was ruled by money and greed, like many other characters at this time. As stated by Nick Carraway, “Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness…” (179). Throughout the novel Fitzgerald describes most of the characters to rely on their money, just as Daisy had.…

    • 322 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald elaborates the color white to represent purity and how it is a color worn by people who have feign personalities. White is a color used often to show how someone might seem innocent on the outside, but they are not who people truly think they are. Daisy uses people to get what she wants and lets other people, such as Gatsby, clean up her mess. Although Fitzgerald describes Daisy enough to make her worthy of Gatsby’s ultimate desire, in the end, her real intentions are…

    • 869 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel, The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is portrayed as being an admirable, wealthy, kind, and genuinely impressive man. However, that being said, he is also portrayed as pretentious, deceptive, criminal, and most importantly to the plot, completely insatiable. Even though the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, heavily sympathizes with Gatsby, he has many character flaws that ultimately assure the failure of his “dream”, and even lead to his untimely demise.…

    • 1042 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Analyzing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, confirms Fitzgerald's realism and outlook of life during the 1920s. He uses literary devices such as symbolism, metaphors, and hyperboles to manipulate the idea of the American Dream, repetition of diction to put emphasis the characters situations, and he uses tone shift to represent the controversial feeling the characters had for one another. Fitzgerald focuses on the corruptions of the American Dream and the lack of morals in human society. Gatsby, the main character in Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, seeks to repair his relationship with the only women he loves, Daisy. Daisy leaves Gatsby, while he is at war, for a man of wealth and high social status.…

    • 354 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gatsby shows great and immense love for Daisy. He does everything he can to get her to be with him. Gatsby becomes ridiculously rich and powerful so he can be what she wants. To achieve his mass wealth Gatsby does many shift and shady deals with Meyer Wolfshiem. He buys a house across from hers to be closer to Daisy,"Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay" (Fitzgerald 83). He throws huge extravagant parties to get his name known to the wealthy people. He creates an image of himself the goes through the area. He throws these parties in the hopes one day Daisy will wander in.…

    • 339 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Jay Gatsby

    • 1074 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most interesting males in fictional literature, even though he is not a dynamic and changing character during the novel. In fact, Jay Gatsby has changed little since he was a teenager. He was born as James Gatz to poor farmers in North Dakota and he decided at an early age that he wanted more out of life than North Dakota could offer. He leaves home to find excitement and wealth. While lounging on the beach one day, he sees a yacht docked off the coast. He borrows a boat and rows out to introduce himself to the owner of the yacht; the owner takes a liking to young James Gatz and offers him a job. When he takes the job he leaves behind the identity of James Gatz forever; the rest of his life he will be known as Jay Gatsby, an incurable and idealistic romantic who fills his life with unrealistic dreams – to capture the past.…

    • 1074 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Firstly, wealth is the origin of Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy. Gatsby believes he is “the son of God” (Fitzgerald 105) and struggles to civilize himself into a wealthy man. When he is a poor soldier, he meets Daisy, “the first ‘nice’ girl” he has never met (Fitzgerald 158). Throughout the story, it is found that she is…

    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, there are many fascinating and dynamic characters. The character that appeals and changes most throughout the text is Jay Gatsby. At the beginning of the novel, when the reader officially met Gatsby for the first time, Gatsby is an attention-grabbing and confident man who is mysterious and is a complete enigma to the audience. As the novel progressed, the reader learned more and more about what type of man Gatsby is and the mysteries surrounding him. Jay Gatsby is an extremely fascinating and dynamic character because of his unpredictability throughout the novel.…

    • 653 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Gatsby wanted to be rich but his main motivation in obtaining his money$ was his infatuation for Daisy Buchanan. Hence with trying to get back together with Daisy as his main objective, Gatsby has taken the path of crime and illegal activity in order to achieve his goals. The path that has compromised on his morals and value. It is seen throughout the novel that this means to achieve his envisioned end was clearly not justified. Even through his bootlegging activities, Gatsby was unable to attain his goal as he was not born in to wealth and does not possess the lofty social status that comes with that. As such we see how his dream of her disintegrates, revealing the corruption that wealth causes and the unworthiness of the goal as it truly…

    • 134 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Jay Gatsby Essay Example

    • 1180 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Fitzgerald wisely shows how Gatsby uses his riches to buy Daisy. In the story, we know that "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things . . . and then returned back into their money" By this, we know that Daisy's main (and maybe only) concern is money. Gatsby realizes this, and is powered by this. He is driven to extensive and sometimes illegal actions. He feels he must be rich and careless for his five year love. All these enlighten us to Gatsby's personality, therefore we know Gatsby is willing to use an unlimited source of income to actually buy trifles to prove his worth to Daisy. He will buy a house that takes, even him, three years to pay for and purchases clothes every Spring and Fall. He does…

    • 1180 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, has been celebrated as one of the greatest - if not the greatest - American works of fiction. Of course, one could convincingly argue that Gatsby barely qualified as fiction, as it is the culmination of a trio of Fitzgerald’s work that traces his own experiences and emotions. Perhaps guided by his early life – in which the family lived a hard working life for many years before settling down to live from his mother’s inheritance – ( Prigozy, 13) Fitzgerald at once both idolized and despised the lavish lifestyle of the Roaring Twenties. Fitzgerald's conflicting thoughts can be seen in the contrast between the novel's hero, Jay Gatsby, and its narrator, Nick Carraway. Gatsby represents the naive Midwesterner dazzled by the possibilities of the American dream. Much the same can be said about Fitzgerald – a dreamer who came from upstate New York, and Minnesota. Carraway represents the Ivy League gentleman who casts a suspicious eye on that notion – and who eventually heads back to his native Minnesota. Carraway – literally and figuratively – provides commentary on Gatsby’s elusive American Dream.…

    • 1582 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    This is possibly due to his upbringing in poverty, but it is clear that everything Gatsby sis with his wealth was done for Daisy. When Gatsby comes home from the war and learns that Daisy has married Tom, Gatsby quickly and mysteriously amasses large amounts of money in hopes that his wealth will bring Daisy back to him. When Gatsby throws his crazy parties, he isn’t doing it because he enjoys it, he is doing it because he thinks Daisy will enjoy it. “He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray.” (page 92) Even when Gatsby does get Daisy’s attention again, he does everything he can think of to keep her interested by showing off all of these useless glittering things that he has collected. It starts with him showing of a grand organ in the foyer, for which he keeps a person staffed to play whenever he desires, and ends with him literally shoving his wealth in her face by throwing all of these fine shirts at Daisy. Only when she starts crying does he stops and she says it’s because she’s never seen such beautiful shirts before. Gatsby never gets caught up in all of the shining parties he throws and doesn’t seem to care about anything he owns that daisy doesn’t find suitable. Gatsby even treats Nick with genuine kindness and tries to dispel harmful rumors about himself because he cares what nick thinks of him as a person. Gatsby is the only wealthy person in this book to never show unnecessary malice unless Daisy is…

    • 967 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Is Jay Gatsby A Good Man

    • 336 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Jay Gatsby is like the American government – the weak, dishonest, inefficient government we believe to be the best in the world. His individual qualities are ones that, when examined objectively, should be frowned upon. Like the government, we can hate these qualities but love the whole. From the beginning of The Great Gatsby, he is protected by the most influential character; the narrator. Because our first impression of Gatsby is provided by a biased friend of his, our view is skewed in his favor, resulting in overcompensation for his obvious flaws. Gatsby is not a good man, we just want him to be. We so strongly want to believe that he is great and pure that we are willing to look past his inherent qualities, to construct in our minds a…

    • 336 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays

Related Topics