Great Gatsby

Ashley Ducrepin
Summer English – Mr. George
08.02.09
The Great Gatsby

Happiness? Doesn’t Exist

The world is full of ambitious people who try to find things in life to make and keep them happy. People will risk almost anything to live a happy life. Some people never find a moment of happiness and some are mistaken to believe that they’ve actually found what they’ve been searching for. It may be argued that some people do find happiness, however this is impossible because just as F. Scott Fitzgerald emphasizes in The Great Gatsby, there is no such thing as happiness. He says, “life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat and redeeming things are not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions of the struggle.” This quote is supported throughout the text by Fitzgerald’s depictions of many of the characters and the struggles they go through. We see the absence of happiness in three characters: Tom Buchanan, Daisy, and Jay Gatsby.

One of the most common things people do to achieve happiness is get married. The object of a wedding is for two people to live a united and happy life together. However, as Fitzgerald develops this recurring theme expressing that there is no such thing as happiness, it prevents one couple from being content. Daisy and Tom Buchanan are clearly unhappy together but it is also evident that they both love each other. Throughout the text, Tom seems to be frustrated with Daisy. In response to the comment Daisy makes about the books Tom reads, he says, “’ Well, these books are all scientific,’ insisted Tom” and he “glances at her impatiently” (13). Tom has a short temper and he gets easily upset at anything Daisy does. He is mentally and physically abusive towards Daisy. Daisy acknowledges his temperament and blames herself for it: “‘You did it, Tom,’ she said accusingly, ‘I know you didn’t mean to, but you did it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man’” (12). Tom’s solution to the lack of joy in the relationship was to find happiness elsewhere and he did. He began an affair with another married woman named Myrtle. He seemed to treat her much better than his wife, Daisy; he even buys Myrtle a dog. Despite his attempt to pursue a happier lifestyle with someone else, Tom remains “‘a terrible pessimist about things’” (12). Therefore it proves that the gratifying feeling of happiness can never be obtained.

Daisy, on the other hand, was unhappy even before marrying Tom. She was in love with another man named Jay Gatsby but she could not be with him. With her heart broken and vulnerable, she impulsively entered a relationship with Tom Buchanan and eventually married him. As Gatsby explains: “‘she only married you [Tom] because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake’” (130). Daisy’s objective in marrying Tom was to live a happy life since she could not achieve that with Gatsby. However, Fitzgerald showed, once again, that happiness is not attainable. Tom, in no way, represented a sense of happiness for Daisy at any point. He was simply the deeper satisfaction of Daisy’s struggle. Nevertheless, Daisy was in love with him and it was obvious because of her actions: “‘she used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap … looking at him with unfathomable delight’” (77) and Daisy also admits, “‘I did love him [Tom] once’” (132). As they say, love is blind and love led her to falsely believe that she was happy. So when she crossed paths with Gatsby again, she was able to realize that she was never happy.

We’re introduced to Gatsby by the narrator, Nick. As Nick vividly describes Gatsby’s lifestyle we decipher that Gatsby is a wealthy man: “Gatsby in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie, hurried in” (84). His appearance was apparently very important to him and one can only imagine how much an outfit like that would cost. Gatsby not only decked himself in the finest clothing but he also lived in a massive mansion. On his way home one night, the narrator (Nick), believed that his house was on fire because “the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner, I saw that it was Gatsby’s house lit from tower to cellar” (81). Gatsby’s home was so big that its lights lit up the skies. He lit up his home because Gatsby was a very social person and held many parties at his house. While most people barely knew Gatsby, they still attended the party because Gatsby provoked a sense of curiosity in many people. “In his [Gatsby’s] blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths” (39). Gatsby was popular among those who knew him and didn’t because even “on week-ends, his Rolls Royce turned into an omnibus bearing parties to and from the city” (39). With a lifestyle so lavish and full of people every weekend, one would thing Gatsby would be the happiest man alive. Yet, Gatsby was not living in bliss. He was not truly happy living his life solely, with nobody to share it with. He explains, “‘I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people’” (90). Inviting copious amounts of people to his home was his attempt to find happiness within his lavish lifestyle. Again, Fitzgerald makes it known that happiness cannot be reached because it is unrealistic. With so many people to share his wealth with, Gatsby fails to find a sense of joy. So he ventured out to find something else to make him happy, and it was his old love, Daisy. It was almost as if he found happiness through Daisy: “He [Gatsby] hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes … he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real” (91). Suddenly everything he had was no longer important to him because he was with the woman he always loved but things didn’t go as smooth as planned once again proving that happiness is simply unreal.

Life is unpredictable and we all live our lives attempting to be in control. Most try and find happiness in their lives but we have no control over how rewarding our lives can be. Some experience some of the redeeming things in life and they define that as a moment of much needed happiness. However, these rewards are not a representation of happiness but they represent “the deeper satisfactions of the struggle”. In conclusion, happiness is simply impossible to acquire because once we receive something that we believe makes up happy – it turns out that it is simply meant to be and F. Scott Fitzgerald excelled in making this a true statement throughout the text.