Time in The Great Gatsby Essay Example

In the making of “The Great Gatsby” The author F.Scott Fitzgerald portrays important messages in the novel by his symbolic use of time in order to express how reality creates disillusionment. 

The book written by F.Scott Fitzgerald called the Great Gatsby was set in the 20s or as many people would say the roaring twenties. The decade got its name from the amount of expressionism and idealism the decade had. During this decade the old Victorian age was dying and people had more freedom on what they could do. In “the great gatsby”, Time and the setting of the time are crucial to the characters. For instance, Daisy, when she was a young girl in Louisville Kentucky in her teens she had most of what all girls wanted. She had the wealth, the popularity, and the boys but with great advantages come great disadvantages, with all that she has, she also comes with the great responsibility of upholding her family's legacy to marry wealthy and having no choice of who she marries even if she was already in love with jay gatsby. In this quote“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,’ she went on in a convincing way. ‘Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. & I KNOW. I’ve been everywhere & seen everything & done everything.’ Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, & she laughed with thrilling scorn. ‘Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!’” (Fitzgerald 20).

Daisy in the future is proud to be in a high-class society that only certain people can be in. She knows her status and how being with gatsby can destroy her status. We know she is not being careless as if she was being careless and she would rather be with Gatsby because she is not happy according to this quote. In this quote we can see she seems tired of people having this view of her, that is living a rich life is easy and can do whatever she wants. But in reality, she can’t do whatever she wants because even with all the money she has she has to protect her and her family's reputation. Her marriage to Tom is what most people would say a gilded cage. A gilded cage is an imaginary or mental cage that she was forced into by her family and her friends. For example in chapter 4, when she was with Jordan and Jordan was a bridesmaid and told us that Daisy was crying and drunk and was refusing to go because of a letter she got from Gatsby and wanted the pearls that represented her innocence around her neck gone be. But her friends and family other than Jordan sort of forced her to cooperate. They force her to cooperate because  Tom is rich, he is wealthy, he is from old wealth and has good relationships with other rich people. He is the perfect man for daisy to marry but even though he is perfect. He is only perfect for the family and the family's status but he is not perfect for Daisy and doesn't make her truly happy. So Daisy knows that she can't have both happiness and good status because if she ever broke up with Tom and went to Gatsby, people would see her as selfish, unappreciative of what she has and would ruin not only her own status but her family's status, her daughters status, toms status and even gatsby status and peoples perspective of them. This further proves that reality causes disillusionment because Daisy’s perfect world would be if she would be both happy and have good status but reality proves her wrong. Many characters in “The Great Gatsby” show the sadness of disillusionment but one person in particular shows it the most and that character is Jay Gatsby. The difference between Daisy’s and Gatsby's illusions is that Daisy has accepted that her reality cannot fulfill the wishes of her perfect world but Gabtsy can not. In this quote, “Nick tells Gatsby, ‘You can't repeat the past,’ Gatsby replies, ‘Why of course you can.’”In this quote, Gabtsy is stuck in the past, so much so that basically creates his life around the past or more particularly daisy. Daisy is the main idealization of his illusion. In the first chapter of “The Great Gatsby”, we see that Gatsby is reaching out towards a green light at the end of Daisy’s pier. This is where we first see a glimpse of Gatsby's romantic illusion with Daisy and what they had before. Gaby hopes that with his new rich lifestyle and status he can get Daisy to leave tom. But the matter is that he dreams and hopes in his illusion of the Daisy before the war, which is not the daisy now. Daisy is now older and has all she really needs in life. She has the money, the husband, and her heir, there is no need for Daisy to ever leave her life right now and go to Gatsby. Gaby can not see it, he can not see the reality of Daisy being different than who she was before the war. In the book, we see countless times where Gabtsy tries and tries over again to get Daisy back for example the party he threw for her and when she said she did not like it and referred too much like an ‘amusement park’. When Daisy hints at this Gatsby leaves Daisy at the party because in his illusion Daisy is still wild and free and would have loved the party instead of disimproving the party. Gatsby's illusion has been in mind for many years and has spiraled him so far that it eventually ends in myrtles murder after confessing his love to daisy in front of tom. This proves that reality causes disillusionment because in Gatsby's perfect world Daisy would be her past self and they would be rich and happy together forever but the reality is that Daisy is not the same Daisy as before the war and Daisy are fulfilled with the life she has now. In Conclusion, F.Scott Fitzgerald portrays the symbolic use of time by using the character's past to reflect on their future selves as a message we see in the two quotes. In the two quotes mentioned before we see how some people can change and move on with life while other people are stuck in the past and can not accept change and are stuck in that frozen moment of time their whole lives.