Examples Of Hope In The Great Gatsby

It was his hope that drew Nick Carraway in. Jay Gatsby’s money, his grandeur palace, his fancy cars, his lavish parties, his sumptuous possessions all failed to excite Nick, yet Gatsby’s hope sang a siren’s song, drawing him nearer and nearer with peaked curiosity. It was in Gatsby’s hope of the future that Nick understood love and pain, honesty and deceit, honor and cowardice, respect and disdain. However, from Gatsby’s great hope, Nick comes to forever be tortured with the realization of the struggle humans face in trying to attain their dreams by surpassing while repeating the past. This was the fault in Gatsby’s hope: believing he could attain his goal by simply repeating the past. Yet, Gatsby did not realize that this philosophy would prove him unable to move beyond the past.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby epitomizes the American Dream, never losing optimism, expanding all his energy, trying to run towards his dream in pursuit of a something that gets farther and farther from his reach because this dream is already behind him.
He looked into the future with eyes of the past. This was Fitzgerald’s idea of the American Dream: running towards a dream that is already gone, leaving only a void to which must be called hope in order to keep going. Gatsby could not accept this, however. He believed his hope was alive and attainable. Yet, Gatsby knew that when he loved Daisy, he gave her something he could never get back, leaving him empty when she was gone. His love, the hope that went into loving her, was something Gatsby was trying to recreate in order to reach the thing that he lost so long ago in the midst of Daisy. So, was it Daisy or what she stood for, what she possessed from Gatsby’s love, which he reached towards? Whatever it happened to be, it was an aspiration of the past, a hope of desperation, faith of