Saturday, November 5, 2011

What is ideal about Gatsby's dream? What is corrupt?

In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby's view of and love for Daisy is idealistic from the beginning. 


Nick, recalling Gatsby's courtship from five years before the novel's present, says that Daisy was the first "nice" girl Gatsby had ever known; Gatsby "had never been in such a beautiful house [Daisy's] before"; there was a hint in her house 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"; she was highly sought after, so Gatsby "took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously--eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand."


Gatsby puts Daisy on a pedestal from which he never removes her.  Even after she allows him to take the blame for Myrtle's death and chooses to stay with Tom, he spends the next morning waiting for a phone call from her.


And his ideal is corrupt as all ideals are corrupt:  they are unrealistic; too good to be true, as the cliche goes.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Discuss at least two characteristics of Romanticism in John Keat's poem "Ode toa Nightingale".

The poet in Ode To A Nightingale  is an escapist .He escapes through imagination .On his way the bower of the bliss wher the nightingale is ...