Examples Of Daisy In The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published in 1925, in the middle of the roaring 20s. The book is set in Long Island, New York, in the early 1920s. The narrator Nick Carraway has moved to West Egg the new money central of New York, to become a bondsman. Little does he know that his new neighbor, Jay Gatsby, holds an undying love for his cousin Daisy Buchanan. This novel tells a tragic love story of two people behind their time. From beginning to end, Fitzgerald uses his characters -Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby- to show the pessimistic, greedy, and untruthful outlook of the Jazz Age through his novel.

Tom Buchanan, the notorious, old money polo payer, demonstrates self-destructive and deceitful qualities throughout the book.

A good of example of this is Gatsby’s self-destructive dreams of Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby holds this “golden girl” image of Daisy in his mind, he stills thinks of her as if she’s the young girl from Louisville. When Jordan tells us about her encounter with Gatsby in chapter four, “He doesn’t know very much about Tom, though he says he’s read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy’s name.” (Fitzgerald 86 online text). Gatsby read the paper in an area miles away from him just to know what was going on in Daisy’s life; even though more than half of the time the papers weren’t about Daisy he still kept reading them. Another way Fitzgerald shows Superficial behaviors are the extravagant parties Gatsby throws. He only throws the parties because he has such an extravagant plan in his mind to win Daisy back, “‘I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night,’ went on Jordan, ‘but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found.” (Fitzgerald 85 online text). Gatsby doesn’t know the people at his parties, they don’t respect him, and they don’t respect his house. The people see Gatsby’s parties as somewhere they can drink, somewhere they can let loose; it’s like if you were to set a large group of children loose in a mansion with alcohol and no supervision. Yet he still does it all for Daisy. In her 1916 article, Americanism, Agnes Repplier speaks about the American Dream; Fitzgerald does a good job of supporting her statement, “Of all the countries in the world, we and we only have any need to create artificially the patriotism which is the birthright of other nations.” (Repplier Americanism). In his book Fitzgerald shows the societal views of the 1920s, accordingly revealing his own views as