Practice Essay – The Great Gatsby

Describe a Key Relationship between two or more characters or individuals in the text. Explain how this relationship helped you to understand at least one of these characters or individuals.

Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanon

When Gatsby and Daisy knew each other five years prior to the setting of the novel, they were in love and didn’t have a care in the world for what was happening around them and what was going to happen in the future, it seemed to be the perfect life to not have a care in the world and be stress-free. Since they met when Gatsby had been recruited into the war effort Gatsby was called off to war. They wrote multiple times and kept in touch, but then Daisy met Tom Buchanan and fell in love with him and his money. They got married and Gatsby didn’t know about this particular development as by this point the communication between them would have slowed down a bit. When Gatsby found out about how Daisy had betrayed him by marrying another man he was depressed and thought he wasn’t worthy enough as he was poor when he joined the army for adventure and met Daisy, he thought that if he got enough money to support Daisy’s rich lifestyle he could win her back from Tom since he loved her more than Tom did and she loved him. He became obsessed with this goal in mind, formulating a future plan for both of them to be together.

Their relationship was one that was very complicated in a way that made the events in the book spring to life and manifests into toxic infatuation on Gatsby’s end and terrified cowardice from Daisy. When Daisy meets Gatsby for the first time in five years she is shocked to learn that some small part of her still loves him and she knows that he loves her as he made that painfully obvious when he invited her over to his house and to multiple of his parties. During the time that Gatsby and Daisy had together, you can make a comparison to how they were five years before their reunion. Gatsby was so fixated of what was, that he tried to make it like that again by recreating it but better and to be as impressive and magnificent enough to draw daisy back into his life the way she was when they had first met.

“Can’t repeate the past?… Why of course you can!”

– Gatsby

This relationship between Gatsby and Daisy, past and present, helps to develop a better understanding of Jay Gatsby on a deeper level to as why he had such an obsession with Daisy and why Daisy is like the way she is. Daisy is a coward because she grew up without the consequences her actions might have caused. She grew up with the money to escape the major consequences and live a life of luxury when others couldn’t, she could afford to be reckless and spontaneous because she had the money to allow her to do the things that might not necessarily be a good thing. An example is when she ran over Myrtle, she was driving and seemingly swerved into the path of Myrtle Wilson. After this event, she went home and had a cry and didn’t tell anybody about what had happened, Gatsby took the blame as it was his car, and that was that.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess thay had made.”

– Nick

When Gatsby died, Daisy didn’t go to his funeral as Nick would have expected, but she ran away with Tom, her husband, and their daughter. Not so much as a phone call as to say sorry to Nick before they left to go on a ‘holiday’.

Gatsby was so obsessed with Daisy that he would watch the green light at the end of her dock at night, longing for a life he has imagined in his head. understanding his past adds to the absurdity of why he wants Daisy, by the time he actually gets to her and finds her to be married to another man, I don’t think he actually loves her. He came from a poorer family and grew up wanting more, so when he got scooped up by Dan Cody and got offered to make the fortune of his life, he took it and became Jay Gatsby. His idea of the American Dream was all completed save, for one thing, love. Love ment Daisy as they had had a falling in love before he went to war, this is where the obsession came from, him wanting everything he never had, to be the first to truly live out the American Dream, the want of never having to worry about the consequences again. Daisy was his missing piece to the puzzle of his life, the last thing he needed to complete the American Dream, but he didn’t realize that he couldn’t have her as she couldn’t leave the social aspect of her life, couldn’t leave what she was used to.

“Her voice is full of money’ he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood it before. It was full of money – that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it … high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…”

– Gatsby

Daisy has always lived in money, having someone to clean up after her and take care of her, from her father’s house and money to her husband’s house and miney she has always had someone with the money to take care of her and wipe her stupidity out of her previous actions. So when Gatsby dies, he was waiting for a call from Daisy but is shot before he could get an answer from her. This is apart of their relationship because, in the ending of it all, Daisy didn’t care enough about Gatsby to go to his funeral. She grew up in a safe world where nothing could ever happen to her and she always had someone to clean up the messes she left behind her, but with the situation of Gatsby suddenly dying, no one could clean that up for her, so she fled. This is where the cowardice comes in, she’s never had to face real-life messes before as she always had someone to do it for her, but when she’s confronted about the prospect of having to clean up her life and what she does, she runs away.

“I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”