The Great Gatsby and Putting Pursuit Into Perspective
I was sitting at Caribou (yes- again) and chatting with a friend. We started out on a light topic of books and what we were/had currently been reading. This somehow wound around to the deeper subject love and of a cat-and-mouse relationship that two of our friends are involved in. We were chatting about it for a moment when it finally hit me- their relationship is like one of my favorite books: The Great Gatsby.
For those of you who have not had the pleasure of reading it, I will give you a brief synopsis. It is a tale well-penned by the author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The two main characters you need to know about for the purposes of this blog entry are the title character, Jay Gatsby, and a well-off socialite, Daisy Buchanon. It is set in the 1920’s during a period of opulence. Gatsby is an odd man that you don’t find much about directly, it is more through his indirect relationship with other characters that you learn what type of a man he is. Daisy is a reckless, fairly self-centered well-to-do individual who married a man named Tom for money and status. They met in Louisville in 1917 and Gatsby fell madly in love with her.
Now that you know enough about the two main characters I will be discussing, I shall delve further into the portions that are metaphorically relevent to this entry.
My original interest in the story was as a book for a thesis paper in high school that I had to write for an advanced placement class. The title of my thesis was (I believe- I can’t really remember for sure) The Great Gatsby and the Modern American Dream. I chose this title because I believed there to be a direct correlation between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work and the way in which America had modernized the “American Dream”. But I digress, I’ll explain more of the book, and you can see where I might have gotten that theory- if there is any interest, I would be willing to post my thesis for discussion)…
The book starts out with Gatsby (he is very rarely referred to as Jay in the book) staring out across a pond at a distant green light. The light is that at the end of the dock of Daisy’s residence. This is symobolically significant because right away within the book, Fitzgerald is letting us know that Gatsby is pining after something. In this case, it is Daisy. We find out as the story continues, that Gatsby fell in love with Daisy many years ago, and has spent his entire life thereafter becoming someone “suitable” for her. He has amassed a great amount of wealth, followed her every move, and even moved to his current residence just so he could be near her. He begins to throw lavish parties in the hope that she will arrive, albeit uninvited (strange dynamic involved here- but to make a long story short- everyone wants what they can’t have)- because, remember, she is a socialite. Eventually she does show up and this is when Gatsby knows the time is right. He begins to somewhat overtly pursue her after that night. On one occasion, inviting her up to his room to show her clipppings he had saved about her, he watches her every move and judges her during this time- and this is where my point begins to be proven, as shown in the following quote:
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion…”
The book quickly begins to run the rest of it’s course. It covers Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship, the relationship of her husband, Tom, and his mistress, and their awkward love triangle/square. None of these facts are necessary to delve into further than that (although it does make for a fascinating read). Daisy still continues to never fully live up to the dream Gatsby had developed in his mind over the years. Her pedestal was tall and she never could quite reach the top. He still continued the relentless pursuit, but his passion began to wane until it became a pursuit for the sake of pursuit. She begins to slowly realize that she will never be what he wants. And Tom finds out about their affair. He, although involved in his own, is furious at the thought of her infidelity and confronts them both. At this point in time, Gatsby and Daisy leave the place where Tom is and head back to their home (they had all taken a trip). Eventually TOm and a few of their friends begin driving back after them. They find out that the car Gatsby and Daisy had been in struck and killed Tom’s lover. Tom rushes back home to find that Daisy was the one who had been driving when the accident occured, but Gatsby plans to take all of the blame. The next day, Tom tells his lover’s husband that it was Gatbsy that killed his wife (yes- she was also married). He jumps to the conclusion that the one driving the car must have been his wife’s lover and sets out to exact his revenge. He finds Gatsby at home in his pool and shoots him dead before taking his own life.
All right, now that I’ve given a not-so-brief overview of the plot, (sorry for anyone who hasn’t read it- you really should still go out and get it. There is so much more on the pages than I could ever fit into a condensation of the plot) I can get to my point.
As it pertains to the situation, both Gatsby and Daisy represent two of my friends. The one has been pursuing the other for years- and I have no doubt his intentions are good. The other has been “pulling a Daisy” in that she has been doing a whole lot of leading him on but never truly being with him (I forgot to mention that Daisy refuses to leave her husband for Gatsby even though she continues the affair). It has all wound down into a black spiral. Just as in the story, my friend has spent all of these many years in the pursuit of his “Daisy”, and as all do when a pursuit becomes an obsession, he has built her up in his mind. The longer the pursuit lasts, the higher the pedestal becomes. She allows this to continue without giving anything back to him, rather teasing him and giving only the smallest of tastes to keep him craving more. It has become an all-consuming obsession for him now. Friends and other obligations are thrown aside in an attempt to woo her- all to no avail. It has almost become an obsession not of her, but of the pursuit. And she feeds off of it.
Because of this obsession, whenever they get close to developing a relationship, it always folds under its own weight. She falls short of the perfection he has attributed to her in his mind, which causes him to step back from his passions for her. Which causes her to realize that she isn’t on the pedestal, which causes her to be irritated with him, which causes him to even further realize that she isn’t what he had brought himself to believe she was, which causes him to step back more, and… well… you get the idea. Eventually the obsession itself destroys its own object and it implodes- only to be brought back around to a re-culmination when the passion again builds to it’s former level. The passion, obsession, and pursuit kill the dream because it is not grounded in reality, and has reached unhealthy proportions. They don’t realize that they, themselves, are crushing their dreams of a relationship. If they would only step back and put a foot on the ground- the solid ground of reality- and put the pursuit in perspective, they could easily attain the dream they have been seeking after for so long…
(Special thanks to www.sparknotes.com for refreshing my extremely retention-challenged brain)
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