The Great Gatsby is a book filled with dynamic characters, written by a dynamic person. Throughout the book, the themes and situations are on many symbolic levels. The Great Gatsby is such a novel, that the hero is portrayed to the reader by a man who, with seemingly no effort, will not judge a man easily. He perceives him, takes him in, and analyzes him. This man’s name is not, in fact, Gatsby, but Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story. The man who is being perceived, of course, is Jay Gatsby, our hero.
Our story, The Great Gatsby, starts out when Nick, a stock trader, moves to West Egg. West Egg is a part of Long Island where the “new” rich people live. “New” rich is a term used to describe people who have recently acquired their wealth, and have no connections in East Egg, where the people who have established their wealth live. Gatsby befriends Nick for a good reason, to meet his long lost love, Daisy, Nick’s cousin and resident of East Egg. Unfortunately for Gatsby, Daisy is married to Tom, a boisterous man who has taken in a mistress and everyone in the novel knows about it.
Throughout the novel, Nick acts as Gatsby’s confidant. A confidant is a person present when a hero needs someone to listen to his plight. We get to know Gatsby, even though he is bad because of the illegal liquor bootlegging operation he runs. We get to know Gatsby because we like the confidant. If Nick, the confidant, is Gatsby’s friend, then Gatsby will be our friend as well. This is true of all relationships that deal with Nick. For the most part, we will feel the same way towards a character as Nick does.
The novel ends in explosion and uproar. Nick, knowing Gatsby’s passion for Daisy, gets the two together for tea. They rekindle their lost love for each other, and, for a long time, they concealed their love for each other from Tom, Daisy’s husband.
gatwomen gatdaisy Plight of Daisy Buchanan in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Great Gatsby Essays
The Plight of Daisy in The Great Gatsby It seems that all that we know about Daisy Buchanan comes through Nick. Most readers see her as superficial, shallow and foolish but this outward appearance is Daisys attempt to conceal how she really feels. Nick tells the reader that Daisy purposely tries to avoid her true feelings because she knows about the severe pain that goes along with facing them. Daisy has several conflicts that she holds inside. For instance, she is aware that Tom has a mistress but does not know how to deal with it. Nick does not understand why Daisy is still married to Tom knowing what he does. At one point, Daisy chose to confess her true feelings to Nick. Daisy says that she rather be a foolincapable of and invulnerable to ideas and emotionsand she hopes that her daughter will be a fool also in order to shield her from the pain and suffering that she went through (160). Another conflict that plagues Daisy is her love for Jay Gatsby. Gatsby and Daisy were in love before he left for the war. After finding out that he was gone, Daisy, withdrew from society and vowed never to love again. Then, Daisy met Tom Buchanan and made herself love him. Daisy almost changed her mind about marrying Tom after receiving a letter from Gatsby before her wedding. Daisy later knew that she could not trust him because he had an affair soon after they married and she was pregnant when she found out about it. After a long history and broken hearts and the realization that love leads to emotional distress, Daisys spirits seemed to be lifted after the meeting with Gatsby. This meeting seemed to bring her back from the world of the emotionally dead (163). Fryer Sarah. Critical Essays of F.Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby. ED. Scott Donaldson. Boston:G.K. Hall