Great Gatsby
...full of money- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it...High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl" (127). This jarring reference to the intoxicating allure Daisy Buchanan holds over Jay Gatsby is the essence of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Gatsby, throughout the novel, is utterly infatuated with Daisy in an extravagant, idealistic, and narcissistic fashion. Gatsby's former lover from his days as a military officer in Kentucky, Daisy radiant with glamour, prestige, dignity, sophistication, social grace, and all the blessings bestowed by the gods of wealth has since married the effete, aristocratic Tom Buchanan. Gatsby, a diligent and resourceful man and one of literature's great Platonic dreamers, literally creates a new identity for himself in hopes of achieving the intrepid and impractical goal of retrieving his long-lost love. What at first appears to be genuine romantic love one would expect to find in 19th century romanticism is actually a thinly veiled form of materialistic lust. While Gatsby professes to adore Daisy, this is because Gatsby's fantastic worldview has objectified Daisy into a consumer product to be acquired through his own accumulation of wealth: what Gatsby holds so dear is not Daisy's frightful personality, but rather her wealth and luxurious lifestyle. Fitzgerald aptly laces profound socioeconomic arguments into the novel by exploring contemporary themes, including materialism, class stratification, changing morality, the hopelessness of "the lost generation" and, above all, the ultimate unraveling of the American Dream and its ideal of economic mobility. Gatsby instills Daisy with a kind of idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor possesses. Gatsby's dream is ruined by the unworthiness of its object, just as the American Dream in the...
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