Focusing on the Past in The Great Gatsby Essay Example

Focusing on the past is a fast track way to miss the present. Jay Gatsby spends five years trying to better himself for Daisy, and when he’s finally reunited with her, he wants to go back and repeat the past. Focusing on the past can only lead to your demise: this is the understanding we come to when analyzing how Jay Gatsby chases the past and his fate in The Great Gatsby by Scott F. Fitzgerald. 

Jay Gatsby was very trapped in the past and was attempting to re-secure Daisy, but only pushed her away. Jay was attempting to relive and rewrite his past with Daisy to the point where he was infatuated with it. Jay Gatsby was so obsessed with rewriting the past that he had rewritten the past in his head to match his ideals of how the past went: "I don't think she ever loved him. You must remember, old sport, she was very excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way that frightened her – that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper. And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying." (Fitzgerald 162). Here he claims that Daisy never loved Tom and that she was very excited for that evening when that is simply not true. Daisy says herself that she did love Tom at one point, additionally all evening she was in distress, moving frantically with panic and her heart was torn on a decision. Gatsby continues to push for Daisy to clarify that she only loved him: “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 is continuing to push for her attention. She isn’t able to make a decision, but he’s so set on her having never loved him that he’s starting to strain the relationship by putting too much pressure on her. In his attempts to reclaim Daisy as his true love, he actually damages the relationship he worked so hard for. 

Gatsby was so obsessed with the past that it was damaging his reputation and himself. He was starting to meddle in business that wasn't his, as Daisy is a married woman, but he continued to flirt with her damaging his reputation. It was also damaging him mentally because of the heart break of knowing she can't be his. Even though he was in denial, he knew Daisy couldn't move on from Tom. Tom speaks on Gatsby trying to relive the past: “I can’t speak about what happened five years ago, because I didn’t know Daisy then — and I’ll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back door” (Fitzgerald 131). Tom shows how Gatsby really shouldn’t be trying to relive five years ago, as now she's taken. Gatsby is still living in the past as though Daisy is still available, but she is married, and he needs to let go. While he was waiting for Daisy to call, Nick notices that he’s genuinely starting to lose hope: “No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock – until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. 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.”(Fitzgerald 111). Gatsby is so hopelessly in love with Daisy that he’s willing to spend a whole day waiting for her to call, but Nick points out that when he does notice essentially him only having the one dream for Daisy and the past he’s lost meaning to his life, which is very damaging to one's soul. Gatsby was destroying his reputation and building up a new one as a scandalous man and focused so intensely on Daisy that when she didn't call it hurt him greatly. 

In Gatsby's quest for Daisy’s love, he was ultimately destroyed. Gatsby and Daisy get into a car together and Daisy drives, she ends up hitting Myrtle, Tom's mistress and Wilson's wife. Gatsby decides to take the blame for her, which leads to his doom. Daisy ends up running over Myrtle with Gatsby's car, but he takes the blame for her; "Was Daisy driving? "Yes," he said after a moment, "but of course I’ll say I was. You see, when we left New York, she was very nervous, and she thought it would steady her to drive—and this woman rushed out at us just as we were passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute" (Fitzgerald 154). Reliving the past with Daisy plagued his mind so much he was willing to take the blame for a murder. He was willing to destroy his reputation that he's built as a gentleman just for Daisy. Later, they discover Gatsby and Wilson's corpses on Gatsby's property: “It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.” (Fitzgerald 173). He was killed because he took the blame for Daisy and Wilson shot him in revenge of his late wife Myrtle. If he wasn’t so obsessed with Daisy and let her take the fall she earned, he wouldn't have been killed. Gatsby made irresponsible decisions, and it led to the ultimate demise, death. 

After examining The Great Gatsby by Scott F Fitzgerald we notice Jay Gatsby’s fate and that it directly correlates with him chasing the past, we come to the conclusion that focusing on the past can only lead to your demise. In his efforts to recover Daisy as his genuine love, he endangers the relationship he has fought so hard to build. Gatsby was destroying his reputation and constructing a new one as a scandalous man, and he was so fixated on Daisy that it wounded him terribly when she didn't call. Gatsby made foolish errors of judgment, which ultimately led to his death.