Is Gatsby A Classic Romantic Analysis

In The Great Gatsby, the main character, Jay Gatsby, is often associated with his flamboyant parties, wealth, and the style of the 1920s that is vividly depicted throughout F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing. While Fitzgerald vibrantly illustrates Gatsby as a hopeless romantic, it can, and has been, argued that Jay Gatsby is a comical character with narcissistic tendencies as well.

In “Gatsby Is a Classic Romantic” by Robert Ornstein, the author begins by analyzing Jay Gatsby’s “...unending quest of the romantic dream, which is forever betrayed in fact yet redeemed in men’s minds” (Ornstein 34). By stating this, Ornstein has begun to not only analyze Gatsby’s tendency to only see the facts as he wishes to, but he also touches on and summarizes Gatsby’s

Gatsby, however, cannot accept this fact, as can be seen when Gatsby tells Daisy, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Just tell him the truth— that you never loved him— and it’s all wiped out forever” (Fitzgerald 132). Gatsby refuses to believe that Daisy does or has ever loved Tom. At another point in The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is discussing with Nick his goals of going away with Daisy to which Nick states that one cannot replicate previous emotions and memories. Gatsby deliriously refutes Nick’s statement saying,“‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ He looked around him wildly… He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy” (Fitzgerald 110). Fitzgerald gives his audience insight to Gatsby’s persistent, delusional idea of reliving the past, as the narrator, Nick