The Key To Greatness (Great Gatsby) Essay, Research Paper
The Key To Greatness
Happiness is the key to life. Money is the key to happiness, or is it love? Many people have different opinions on what happiness is. Maybe this is because happiness is many different things for many different people, but in the end it all comes down to what the person loves. Some people spend their whole lives trying to succeed in the business world only to gain vast sums of money an die rich and unhappy. Why are these people wasting away their time only to gain material belongings and not love? In the novel The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, mistress, marriage, and true love were the different kinds of love that existed.
Tom Buchanan was married to a woman named Daisy, but had a mistress who lived in the Valley of Ashes. The mistress’s name was Myrtle Wilson. She would wear a tight, brown dress to give the impression that she were rich. Myrtle was not happy with where she was at. She was married to a dirty, greasy mechanic named George Wilson. Myrtle would use Tom to get into the upper-class. Tom in return would go out and show off his girl. “Tom’s got some woman in New York. . . She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Don’t you think?”(Fitzgerald 16). Everyone knew about Tom’s woman, including Daisy. Daisy would not let he feelings about the situation show through to Tom. Tom and Myrtle’s love would soon bring Myrtle to her own death. Myrtle thought she saw Tom and was hit by a car as she ran into the street to flag him down. The car that hit Myrtle was being driven by Daisy Buchanan. Daisy and Tom were then forever to be together.
Daisy and Tom were a married couple living in East Egg. The two moved from Chicago. Tom was a polo player and Daisy would move wherever her husband’s polo playing would take them. “They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together” (Fitzgerald 6). The two owned an elaborate Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The bay separated East Egg from West Egg which was where Jay Gatsby lived.
Although Daisy was married to Tom, she had a love from many years before with Jay Gatsby. Gatsby and Daisy shared something very magical, but Gatsby was sent off to war and by the time he got back, Daisy had found a new love with Tom. Yet Gatsby will never forget his love with Daisy. Gatsby became great in wealth and popularity, but despite this greatness, he struggled to gain the same greatness in his love life. Gatsby could never receive the love he wanted from the one he truly loved. Daisy is his long, lost love. The reason Gatsby made himself so successful in the financial and social world was in the hope of gaining the love he once had with Daisy. He only wanted Daisy. He did not seem to care if Daisy loved him for the real Jay Gatsby he was or for the famous millionaire “Great Gatsby.” ” 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” (Fitzgerald 92). Gatsby
considered his quest for the love him and Daisy once shared to be rekindled, to be the single most important thing in his life. Gatsby was stuck in the past, which was causing him tremendous pain and agony. “He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you” (Fitzgerald 111). Daisy was never able to say that she loved Tom and truly mean it. Gatsby did eventually receive Daisy’s confession of love, but it was not sincere enough for herself to believe it. Gatsby himself did honestly believe that Daisy and him shared the one, pure, eternal love which he had so longed for. Gatsby was living in a dream and when he finally awakened he had lost his life. Gatsby was murdered by Wilson, but that did not matter because the
“Great Gatsby” had already died the day Daisy chose Tom. “He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream” (Fitzgerald 162). This is the way Gatsby felt after failing to succeed in gaining the one thing he would give his life for, Daisy’s love. This great failure brought the great man to his own death.
In conclusion, mistress, marriage, and true love are all very common in The Great Gatsby as well as in our world today. Gatsby never considered himself to be great because he never could obtain the love of his life. Even though everyone thought of Gatsby as being great, he was not great because he was never happy. Happiness equals love, and love is more powerful than money and popularity. People cannot live happily without love. George Horace Lorimer once said, “It’s good to have money and the things money can buy, but it’s good too, to check once in a while and make sure you haven’t lost the things money can’t buy.”