Great Gatsby

Bad Qualities Many of the characters in The Great Gatsby have bad qualities about them, and these affect the people they are involved with worse. Daisy, a very important character in the book can be classified as selfish .When she has to choose between her husband Tom and her old love Jay Gatsby, she chooses Tom so she can live “her rich full life”(149). She is also very careless when it comes to raising her daughter, like saying she hopes that she grows up to be a “pretty fool” (17), because she believes that’s all a girl can be successful as. She likes to cover her new corrupted self by wearing white, because in the book white represents purity and yellow, like Daisy’s hair, represents corruption, and as the years have gone by Daisy’s life has become very corrupted. The main character Gatsby is shown to be stuck in the past. When he is talking to Nick, he tells Gatsby that the past can’t be repeated; Gatsby responds with “of course it can” (116), by doing this he is hurting himself because even though he wants everything with Daisy to be the same as it was he know it can’t. He is also obsessed with being with Daisy again. Every night Nick sees him reach out toward a “green light that burns all night”, but it turns out that the green light is Daisy. He is very “consumed with wonder at her presence" (113) and had done pretty much everything in his power to impress and please Daisy. By being so obsessed with Daisy and having an affair with her, he is affecting Daisy and her husband’s life.
Daisy’s husband Tom Buchanan is a cheater and he is also short tempered. In the beginning of the novel his “woman in New York” (15), who is basically his girlfriend he is having an affair with, and this affects Myrtles relationship with her husband. He is also quite short tempered, especially when he hit Myrtle so hard that she “broke her nose” (37). In the book, Crimson and Red represent rage, and Tom is very acquainted with that color. For example, Daisy and his house is painted “red-and-white”(6), which represents rage being associated with Purity, which basically describes Tom and his wife’s relationship.
Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, keeps many secrets that need to be revealed for the better. In the beginning of the novel he states that he’s “inclined to reserve all judgments” (1), and he keeps his promise by keeping many secrets from people, mostly Tom Buchanans affair with Myrtle Wilson, and Gatsby’s affair with Daisy, which he had helped happen. By doing this he has cause a chain of events that could’ve been avoided if he was just more honest with people about what was really going on.
Most of The Great Gatsby’s characters had bad qualities about them that affected the people who were around them, Daisy’s carelessness is affecting Gatsby and her husband, Gatsby’s obsessiveness with Daisy has affected her life with her husband, Nicks lying to everyone just affects everyone, and Tom’s short temper and cheating affects Myrtle and George Wilsons lives. They all never considered the consequences of their actions and that is probably why the book ended on a very sad note