GG Paper

In the book the The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby tries to live the American Dream. But his view of what the American Dream is, changes when he meets Daisy. The reason is because she is all he wants and will do anything to get her. When he is young he just wants to get rich, then when he meets Daisy he only wants to have things to try and win her, but in the end he loses it all. His dream changes from wanting to be successful to only wanting Daisy and he loses both in the end.

Even when Jay was young, as revealed at the end of the book by his father, has always wanted to be successful. In the book that his father found, he outlined a strict schedule of what his day needed to consist of. “”Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something.”” (Fitzgerald182) In the schedule that he wrote when he was very young he was all about bettering himself and making himself better. He wanted to not do bad things like smoking or chewing, but wanted to do good things like reading.

Then once he gets older and meets Daisy he realizes that she is the only thing that he wants. His love for money takes a back seat while he pursues Daisy. His idea of the American dream changes from only wanting to be successful in monetary ways to only wanting Daisy to fulfill his dream. But then when Daisy marries someone else he is crushed and just wants to get very rich any way that he can because he thinks that the only way that he can get her is being rich. After they meet up for the second time they go over to Gatsby’s house so that he can show her all of his nice things like his shirts to try and impress her and I think it works. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before." (Fitzgerald 98)

Then finally he loses everything. He tries so hard to get two things to complete his dream, Daisy and money. But in the end he ends up with neither. He gets rich off of illegal bonds and they get destroyed after his death. The other thing that he wants, Daisy ends up screwing him because he spends his whole life trying to please her and she just leaves him and doesn’t care about anything that he has done for her. "He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dram must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."(Fitzgerald189)

The moral of the story is to have more than one thing that you strive for in your life because if you focus your whole life on one thing then you will end up hurt because if that one thing changes or dissapoints you then it really affects you. Gatsby's obsession with Daisy leaves him with nothing in the end. He doesnt' care about anything but Daisy and that is not healthy. He doesn't have any friends or other people that he can go to. And when he has his funeral there is only like 3 people there.