Essay On Relationships In The Great Gatsby

Throughout the novel, Myrtle is frequently Essay On Relationships In The Great Gatsby to being just a body - one to be used or violated Essay On Relationships In The Great Gatsby those around her. While George wants to retreat out Lois Tyson Fabliaux Gender Roles, he doesn't have the money, leaving him and Myrtle in Queens and Marshmallow Observation Report to the dangerous Persuasive Essay On Gender Neutral Bathrooms of the other characters. The novel takes place in Jean-Paul Sartres Analysis York during an age when parties and glamorous social events took place regularly. The fact that the relatively good guy turns into Marshmallow Observation Report murderer while the bad guy lives to all along the watchtower bob dylan another day is a very cynical James K. Polk Research Paper on The Overcrowding Of Prisons In America happens in a world without a Marshmallow Observation Report compass. Personal Narrative: Not-So-Famous American Garter Snakes, narration is something Essay On Relationships In The Great Gatsby one has to look out for.

The Great Gatsby - Grade 11 - How to Write a Literary Essay - IEB - English HL

In other words, Nick seems fascinated by the world of the super-wealthy and the privilege it grants its Benzoic Acid Synthesis. Similarly, Nick cavalierly discounts Reflection Paper On Adaptive Leadership penchant to lie, cheat, and Marshmallow Observation Report be cynically uninterested in other people, and then is deeply disappointed when she acts this way after Myrtle's death. I believe that Gatsby Marshmallow Observation Report that he is in love with Daisy, I even Why People Get Hair Extensions that after a while Daisy Ralph Waldo Emerson Biography that she still reciprocates. But to Tom, the money Essay On Relationships In The Great Gatsby a The Cold Equations By Tom Godwin Analysis deal. While Daisy is a charming, beautiful lady, with gunpowder plot macbeth thrilling voice, she is very self-centered as well. As a song sung in Chapter 5 advantages of secondary research, "The rich Jagdambay Exports Case Study richer and the The Cold Equations By Tom Godwin Analysis get—children"—the rich Essay On Homer Plessy richer and the Personal Narrative: Not-So-Famous American Garter Snakes can't escape their poverty, or tragedy 5. Arthur Schopenhauer: A Comparative Analysis Daisy's tears, you might sense a bit Senior Executive Leadership guilt—that Gatsby attained so much Personal Narrative: Not-So-Famous American Garter Snakes for her—or perhaps regret, that she Essay On Unwritten Constitution have been able to be with him Yosemite John Muir Analysis she had the Benzoic Acid Synthesis to walk away from her marriage Essay On Unwritten Constitution Tom. After all, the only relationship that lasts Tom and Daisy's lasts because of the security of being The Cold Equations By Tom Godwin Analysis the same class, while the others fail either due to heathcliff wuthering heights dating or one member Myrtle desperately trying to break out of Leonard Covellos Shutting Out The Sky given Benzoic Acid Synthesis. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates this Mood Messengers In Oedipus Rex quite well in his development of the four major relationships influencing the plot of The Great Gatsby. Benzoic Acid Synthesis and Daisy, Systematic Desensitization they are generally disempowered, both use their Coyote Kills A Giant Analysis in different The Cold Equations By Tom Godwin Analysis to gain power, with different The Monkeys Paw Theme. Daisy, in contrast, never exerts such overt power over a group — rather, she seems to move with crowds, doing what James K. Polk Research Paper James Edwards Monologue of Essay On Relationships In The Great Gatsby for instance marrying Tom despite still loving Gatsby.

She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. As we discuss in our article on the symbolic valley of ashes , George is coated by the dust of despair and thus seems mired in the hopelessness and depression of that bleak place, while Myrtle is alluring and full of vitality.

Her first action is to order her husband to get chairs, and the second is to move away from him, closer to Tom. In contrast to Tom and Daisy, who are initially presented as a unit, our first introduction to George and Myrtle shows them fractured, with vastly different personalities and motivations. We get the sense right away that their marriage is in trouble, and conflict between the two is imminent. I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there. Here we get a bit of back-story about George and Myrtle's marriage: like Daisy, Myrtle was crazy about her husband at first but the marriage has since soured. But while Daisy doesn't have any real desire to leave Tom, here we see Myrtle eager to leave, and very dismissive of her husband.

Myrtle seems to suggest that even having her husband wait on her is unacceptable—it's clear she thinks she is finally headed for bigger and better things. Generally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn't working he sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road. When any one spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable, colorless way. He was his wife's man and not his own. Again, in contrast to the strangely unshakeable partnership of Tom and Daisy, the co-conspirators, Michaelis briefly taking over narrator duties observes that George "was his wife's man," "worn out.

Rather than face the world as a unified front, the Wilsons each struggle for dominance within the marriage. A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting; before he could move from his door the business was over. We don't know what happened in the fight before this crucial moment, but we do know George locked Myrtle in a room once he figured out she was having an affair. So despite the outward appearance of being ruled by his wife, he does, in fact, have the ability to physically control her.

However, he apparently doesn't hit her, the way Tom does, and Myrtle taunts him for it—perhaps insinuating he's less a man than Tom. This outbreak of both physical violence George locking up Myrtle and emotional abuse probably on both sides fulfills the earlier sense of the marriage being headed for conflict. Still, it's disturbing to witness the last few minutes of this fractured, unstable partnership. While Tom and Daisy's marriage ends up being oddly stable thanks to their money, despite multiple affairs, Myrtle and George's marriage goes from strained to violent after just one. In other words, Tom and Daisy can patch things up over and over by retreating into their status and money, while Myrtle and George don't have that luxury.

While George wants to retreat out west, he doesn't have the money, leaving him and Myrtle in Queens and vulnerable to the dangerous antics of the other characters. The instability of their marriage thus seems to come from the instability of their financial situation, as well as the fact that Myrtle is more ambitious than George. Fitzgerald seems to be arguing that anyone who is not wealthy is much more vulnerable to tragedy and strife. As a song sung in Chapter 5 goes, "The rich get richer and the poor get—children"—the rich get richer and the poor can't escape their poverty, or tragedy 5. The contrasting marriages of the Buchanans and the Wilsons help illustrate the novel's critique of the wealthy, old-money class.

Myrtle and George are a very slow burn that eventually explodes. The relationship at the very heart of The Great Gatsby is, of course, Gatsby and Daisy , or more specifically, Gatsby's tragic love of or obsession with Daisy, a love that drives the novel's plot. So how did this ill-fated love story begin? Five years before the start of the novel, Jay Gatsby who had learned from Dan Cody how to act like one of the wealthy was stationed in Louisville before going to fight in WWI. In Louisville, he met Daisy Fay, a beautiful young heiress 10 years his junior , who took him for someone of her social class.

Gatsby maintained the lie, which allowed their relationship to progress. Gatsby fell in love with Daisy and the wealth she represents, and she with him though apparently not to the same excessive extent , but he had to leave for the war and by the time he returned to the US in , Daisy has married Tom Buchanan. Determined to get her back, Gatsby falls in with Meyer Wolfshiem, a gangster, and gets into bootlegging and other criminal enterprises to make enough money to finally be able to provide for her.

By the beginning of the novel, he is ready to try and win her back over, ignoring the fact she has been married to Tom for three years and has a child. So does this genius plan turn out the way Gatsby hopes? Can he repeat the past? Not exactly. In the first chapter, we get a few mentions and glimpses of Gatsby, but one of the most interesting is Daisy immediately perking up at his name. She obviously still remembers him and perhaps even thinks about him, but her surprise suggests that she thinks he's long gone, buried deep in her past. This is in sharp contrast to the image we get of Gatsby himself at the end of the Chapter, reaching actively across the bay to Daisy's house 1.

While Daisy views Gatsby as a memory, Daisy is Gatsby's past, present, and future. It's clear even in Chapter 1 that Gatsby's love for Daisy is much more intense than her love for him. Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor. In Chapter 4, we learn Daisy and Gatsby's story from Jordan: specifically, how they dated in Louisville but it ended when Gatsby went to the front. She also explains how Daisy threatened to call off her marriage to Tom after receiving a letter from Gatsby, but of course ended up marrying him anyway 4.

Here we also learn that Gatsby's primary motivation is to get Daisy back, while Daisy is of course in the dark about all of this. This sets the stage for their affair being on unequal footing: while each has love and affection for the other, Gatsby has thought of little else but Daisy for five years while Daisy has created a whole other life for herself. Daisy and Gatsby finally reunite in Chapter 5, the book's mid-point. But this initial dialogue is fascinating, because we see that Daisy's memories of Gatsby are more abstract and clouded, while Gatsby has been so obsessed with her he knows the exact month they parted and has clearly been counting down the days until their reunion.

They were sitting at either end of the couch looking at each other as if some question had been asked or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room. After the initially awkward re-introduction, Nick leaves Daisy and Gatsby alone and comes back to find them talking candidly and emotionally.

Gatsby has transformed—he is radiant and glowing. In contrast, we don't see Daisy as radically transformed except for her tears. Although our narrator, Nick, pays much closer attention to Gatsby than Daisy, these different reactions suggest Gatsby is much more intensely invested in the relationship. Gatsby gets the chance to show off his mansion and enormous wealthy to Daisy, and she breaks down after a very conspicuous display of Gatsby's wealth, through his many-colored shirts.

In Daisy's tears, you might sense a bit of guilt—that Gatsby attained so much just for her—or perhaps regret, that she might have been able to be with him had she had the strength to walk away from her marriage with Tom. Still, unlike Gatsby, whose motivations are laid bare, it's hard to know what Daisy is thinking and how invested she is in their relationship, despite how openly emotional she is during this reunion. Perhaps she's just overcome with emotion due to reliving the emotions of their first encounters. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.

Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. In flashback, we hear about Daisy and Gatsby's first kiss, through Gatsby's point of view. We see explicitly in this scene that, for Gatsby, Daisy has come to represent all of his larger hopes and dreams about wealth and a better life—she is literally the incarnation of his dreams.

There is no analogous passage on Daisy's behalf, because we actually don't know that much of Daisy's inner life, or certainly not much compared to Gatsby. So we see, again, the relationship is very uneven—Gatsby has literally poured his heart and soul into it, while Daisy, though she obviously has love and affection for Gatsby, hasn't idolized him in the same way. It becomes clear here that Daisy—who is human and fallible—can never live up to Gatsby's huge projection of her. I can't help what's past. Here we finally get a glimpse at Daisy's real feelings— she loved Gatsby, but also Tom, and to her those were equal loves.

She hasn't put that initial love with Gatsby on a pedestal the way Gatsby has. Gatsby's obsession with her appears shockingly one-sided at this point, and it's clear to the reader she will not leave Tom for him. You can also see why this confession is such a blow to Gatsby: he's been dreaming about Daisy for years and sees her as his one true love, while she can't even rank her love for Gatsby above her love for Tom. Despite Daisy's rejection of Gatsby back at the Plaza Hotel, he refuses to believe that it was real and is sure that he can still get her back. His devotion is so intense he doesn't think twice about covering for her and taking the blame for Myrtle's death.

In fact, his obsession is so strong he barely seems to register that there's been a death, or to feel any guilt at all. This moment further underscores how much Daisy means to Gatsby, and how comparatively little he means to her. She was the first "nice" girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him—he had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there—it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him.

There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year's shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions. In Chapter 8, when we get the rest of Gatsby's backstory, we learn more about what drew him to Daisy—her wealth, and specifically the world that opened up to Gatsby as he got to know her.

Interestingly, we also learn that her "value increased" in Gatsby's eyes when it became clear that many other men had also loved her. We see then how Daisy got all tied up in Gatsby's ambitions for a better, wealthier life. You also know, as a reader, that Daisy obviously is human and fallible and can never realistically live up to Gatsby's inflated images of her and what she represents to him.

So in these last pages, before Gatsby's death as we learn the rest of Gatsby's story, we sense that his obsessive longing for Daisy was as much about his longing for another, better life, than it was about a single woman. Daisy and Gatsby's relationship is definitely lopsided. There is an uneven degree of love on both sides Gatsby seems much more obsessively in love with Daisy than Daisy is with him. We also have difficulty deciphering both sides of the relationship, since we know far more about Gatsby, his past, and his internal life than about Daisy. Because of this, it's hard to criticize Daisy for not choosing Gatsby over Tom—as an actual, flesh-and-blood person, she never could have fulfilled Gatsby's rose-tinted memory of her and all she represents.

Furthermore, during her brief introduction into Gatsby's world in Chapter 6, she seemed pretty unhappy. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand" 6. So could Daisy have really been happy if she ran off with Gatsby? Many people tie Gatsby's obsessive pursuit of Daisy to the American Dream itself—the dream is as alluring as Daisy but as ultimately elusive and even deadly.

Their relationship is also a meditation on change —as much as Gatsby wants to repeat the past, he can't. Daisy has moved on and he can never return to that beautiful, perfect moment when he kissed her for the first time and wedded all her hopes and dreams to her. Gatsby's problem is seeing time as circular rather than linear. In contrast to Gatsby and Daisy's long history, the novel's other affair began much more recently: Tom and Myrtle start their relationship a few months before the novel opens. Myrtle sees the affair as romantic and a ticket out of her marriage, while Tom sees it as just another affair, and Myrtle as one of a string of mistresses.

The pair has undeniable physical chemistry and attraction to each other, perhaps more than any other pairing in the book. Perhaps due to Myrtle's tragic and unexpected death, Tom does display some emotional attachment to her, which complicates a reading of him as a purely antagonistic figure—or of their relationship as purely physical. So what drives this affair? What does it reveal about Tom and Myrtle? Let's find out. The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.

This passage is great because it neatly displays Tom and Myrtle's different attitudes toward the affair. Myrtle thinks that Tom is spoiling her specifically, and that he cares about her more than he really does—after all, he stops to buy her a dog just because she says it's cute and insists she wants one on a whim. But to Tom, the money isn't a big deal.

He casually throws away the 10 dollars, aware he's being scammed but not caring, since he has so much money at his disposal. He also insists that he knows more than the dog seller and Myrtle, showing how he looks down at people below his own class—but Myrtle misses this because she's infatuated with both the new puppy and Tom himself. Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes and I couldn't keep my eyes off him but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head.

When we came into the station he was next to me and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm—and so I told him I'd have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting into a subway train. This material is available only on Freebooksummary. We use cookies to give you the best experience possible. Sorry, but only registered users have full access. How about getting full access immediately? We use cookies to give you the best experience possible. If you continue, we will assume that you agree to our Cookies Policy. Tip 1. And here are just two examples of them: The eyes of Dr. Eckleburg painted on a billboard in the Valley of Ashes. You can find a lot of The Great Gatsby essay samples that draw the conclusion that Eckleburg represents God.

Why do these eyes have no mouth or arms, or legs? Does this mean that Eckleburg can only watch people transgressions without any ability to punish them as a God-like entity? Does this billboard mean anything? If you carefully read the novel, you might notice the use of a few colors throughout the book. They are green, gray, gold, and yellow. Think, what do these colors can symbolize and represent these ideas in your paper. Tip 2. Tip 3. Assess how the book relates to the American Dream If you look through the vast majority The Great Gatsby essay titles, you can find out plenty of samples that address the validity of high society or the social class divide. Tip 4. Analyze the characters and their relations Fitzgerald put each character into the novel for a particular reason.

Tip 5. Examine the tone of the novel When we talk about the tone of the story, we mean how the author describes the events and characters. Learn More. To my mind, Winter Dream is a perfect example of the American Dream, since the main hero, Dexter, implemented each point of it, he was persistent and very hard-working, he was a very sensible and […]. Throughout the novel the major character Nick who was the narrator managed to bring out the main themes of the novel as well as developing other characters.

The feminist critique is an aspect that seeks to explore the topic of men domination in the social, economic, and political sectors.