Last days of summer

Joao Carlos Martins
Gale Vathing English Comp 111
5 March 2007

Beyond the dream; the dawn of a depression

Fitzgerald’s description of the United States in the 1920’s gives us a seemingly realistic view of a world that was heading for disaster. Each character in “The Great Gatsby” carries its own weights, values, and morals, but in most cases, they all share some of the same flaws. These flaws, as are revealed throughout the story, serve to illustrate a society that slowly caves in it self, abandoning the original beliefs that had shaped the creation of this new world and recreating a false version of the old, a version that is held by fragile threads and is clearly unsure of its own insignificance. All the characters in the book are linked by one thing; their status and wealth, or lack thereof, and everything that revolves around that. The author, using the eyes and voice of Nick Carraway, a man with principles who was born in a family of the old rich but is able to scrutinize its values, depicts a society that is able to grasp its own demise but completely unable to comprehend the reasons for it. “The Great” Gatsby proves to be consistent with his dreams, willful, and able to find the means to achieve them. Though his life is filled with shady details and criminal acts he maintains a perpetual honesty towards his hopes and beliefs that seem rare to the time in question. He also plays with the illusion of love, and stubbornly lives as a romantic who dreams to be united with his one true love from the past. In fact, everything he does, the great wealth he achieves, the great house he acquires, the great parties he throws on a weekly basis, are, through his own testimony, all but a way to reunite with his long lost love; Daisy. Daisy is a woman born into the world of wealth. Her world didn’t allow for her to think outside of it, to elaborate dreams or cultivate illusions, and so she becomes a selfish, rather coward, and simple reflection of the