Great Gatsby Report - Obsessing over the Past Theme

An Obsession For The Past

Obsessing too much over anything is unhealthy for a human being. Gatsby, in The Great Gatsby, dedicates his life to finding his lost love, Daisy, despite changes that may have occurred since the relationship ended. It is a love from the past that he longs for once again. Gatsby’s obsession gets to the point that he will do almost anything to retrieve the life that he once lived. Due to Gatsby’s attachment to the past and obsession to relive it, he forgets to live in the present and dedicates everything in searching for the history he once knew. Life becomes unsatisfactory until his longing is fulfilled.

Gatsby’s love forms before he leaves for war, to a young woman named Daisy. “She was the first вЂ?nice’ girl he had ever known (p. 148)”. However, he has to leave right when he starts to realize his love for her. While at war, they write letters to each other. Then, Nick retells Gatsby’s story:

After the Armistice he tried frantically to get home, but some complication or

misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now- there was a

quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come.

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and

feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after

all (150).

Daisy ends up marrying a rich man named Tom Buchanan. Gatsby had been poor when he met Daisy, and while he was at war she had chose Tom over waiting for Gatsby, because he was very wealthy already. Gatsby comes home from the war, and realizes he is too late. He strives the rest of his life towards getting rich, to meet Daisy once again and start their relationship over. Jordan Baker tells Nick, “I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night’, went on Jordan, вЂ?but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it (p. 80).”

Gatsby gets rich and buys a huge mansion. He holds parties every weekend to which many people go. Nick, his neighbor, realizes that most of the people there were not even invited, nor do they know Gatsby. Now, he understands why; Gatsby knows many uninvited guests will show up, and the larger the party grows, the greater his hopes of finding someone who knows Daisy will come. Therefore, Gatsby opens up his house almost every weekend to parties that go late into the night, and sometimes do not end until morning, just to try to find Daisy. He dedicates his weekends and privacy of his home to find his past and relive it, due to the attachment to the past that Gatsby has.

Finally, Gatsby’s parties bring a guest familiar with Daisy- none other than his next-door neighbor, Nick, who is also Daisy’s cousin. Gatsby has the story of Daisy, being his long, lost love, told to Nick. Afterwards, Gatsby wonders if Nick would invite Daisy over for some tea, without Daisy knowing the real reason, so Gatsby and her could see each other once again, after “’Five years next November’ (88).” Daisy arrives on the day that Gatsby and Nick had set, but the reunion does not go quite as it was planned. Gatsby arrives shortly after Daisy, “pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets (86)”. The conversation between Gatsby and Daisy is awkward and horrible, and Gatsby begins to think it was all a big mistake. Nick tells him, “’You’re acting like a little boy,’ […] вЂ?Not only that, but you’re rude. Daisy’s sitting in there all alone (89)”. Nick leaves, to let Gatsby and Daisy speak in privacy about the five years that they had missed with each other. When he returns to the house about a half hour later, “every vestige of embarrassment was gone (90)”, and Gatsby seems to literally glow. He had spent years dedicating his life to this very moment, and finally he begins to realize it. Next, Gatsby suggests going over to his house, so Daisy can see how he had changed, mainly in his financial stance, since the last time she had seen him. As they walked through his house, Nick recalls:

He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his

house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in

her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly

toppled down a flight of stairs (92).

Gatsby’s goal for a part of his life was to become rich and be a better man in Daisy’s eyes. Now that Daisy could finally see what he had accomplished, Gatsby is in a daze, as if nothing that is happening is real. Next, he starts to think that the five years of dreaming and imagining of this day did not seem as great in reality. He had formed such an ideal of how Daisy would perform, that it did not seem to be living up to his dream.

He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his

embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her

presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dream it right through to the end,

waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now,

in the reaction, he was