Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Could Daisy be considered the cause of Gatsby's downfall?

This question requires a short recap of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: at the beginning, the narrator Nick Carraway becomes acquainted with his eccentric (and fabulously wealthy) neighbor, Jay Gatsby. As the novel progresses, we learn that Gatsby used to be a poor young man. He fell in love with Daisy, who married Tom Buchanan, presumably because of his comfortable affluence. Since this time, Gatsby has worked hard (often, it's suggested, through illegal means) to build a great fortune and win Daisy's affection. However, in the end Daisy chooses to stay with Tom, and Gatsby is murdered. 


On the surface level, it's easy to blame Daisy for Gatsby's death. Gatsby does, after all, take the blame for striking and killing Myrtle Wilson with his car (even though Daisy was driving at the time), and it's this action that leads to his death. However, Gatsby's fall is more complicated than a car accident. Indeed, because of Daisy, Gatsby devotes his life to amassing a vast, but ultimately meaningless, fortune. I deem it meaningless because it doesn't help Gatsby win Daisy's affection, and it attracts hoards of guests who care very little about Gatsby as a real person. In short, Gatsby's wealth does not actually help him develop meaningful relationships, which is what originally motivated him to get rich in the first place. All in all, it can be argued that Daisy is the catalyst that causes Gatsby to waste his life in a quest for empty fulfillment. Daisy's hand in this process is far more important than her hand in Gatsby's death because, in the end, it's Gatsby's embrace of shallow materialism that proves to be his real downfall.  

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