The Great Gatsby Monologue

The title character of The Great Gatsby is a young man who arose from an indigent neighborhood in rural North Dakota to become immensely wealthy. Fitzgerald initially presents Gatsby as the casual, ambiguous host of the extravagant parties thrown continuously at his mansion. He appears surrounded by luxury, admired by powerful men and pursued by beautiful women. He is the subject of gossip throughout New York and is already set on a high pedestal before he is ever introduced to the reader. From his early youth, Gatsby despised poverty and longed for wealth and sophistication. Fitzgerald propels through the novel obscuring Gatsby’s background and source of wealth in mystery. As a result, the reader’s first, distant impressions of Gatsby strike …show more content…
As his persistent attempt for Daisy shows, Gatsby has an extraordinary ability to make the impossible possible; at the beginning of the novel, he appeared to the reader as he desired to appear to the world, and his true colors aren’t exposed until much later in the novel. Gatsby has literally created his own character, even changing his name “James Gatz – that was really, or at least legally, his name…witnessed the beginning of his career,” to represent the reinvention of himself (Fitzgerald 104). Certainly the title “The Great Gatsby” sets Gatsby up as a man of exceptional power, as it follows the sort of name given to famous magicians such as “The Great Houdini” or “The Great Blackstone” – but unfortunately, much like Gatsby’s expectations of Daisy aren’t fulfilled, neither are the reader’s of Gatsby …show more content…
When they were reunited and he was giving her a tour of his house, she began sobbing when presented to Gatsby’s array of specially selected shirts. She said, “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before,” (Fitzgerald 98). At this point Daisy began to realize that everything Gatsby had achieved in life was for her, and was overwhelmed by the epiphany and feelings of regret. Gatsby was now living the life she thought he could never give her. After Gatsby’s “embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He was full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an unconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an over wound clock,” (97). For the five years that he had been away from her, five years he had spent dreaming of the time where they’d meet again, she was now standing three feet away from him as she brushed her hair in his very own bedroom. He believed that she would be much like the vision he had in his head of her, the perfect, gentle, rich Southern debutant that had been the queen of his heart for so long. However underneath her delicate, composed exterior was a greedy woman who had left the man she loved for money. Gatsby longs to re-create a vanished past – his time in Louisville with Daisy – but is incapable of