Character Ambiguity In The Great Gatsby

Particularly, Daisy has a “low, thrilling voice” (Fitzgerald 13) that is “full of money” (Fitzgerald 127). Nick describes Daisy’s face as “sad and

We are taught from an early age that no matter how pretty, how smart, or how rich you are friendships are made from the kindness of your heart. This is one of the greatest myths in American society. Fitzgerald amplifies this with Daisy and Tom. They are horrendous people who cheat, and who neglect, and who only care about themselves. Yet, they have numerous friends and many lovers and many people who adore them.

Malak Aldajain Marjory Hutchison de Medina ENGL2250 June 6th, 2016 A Character Study Daisy in The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby is a widely-known piece by Scott Fitzgerald, a prominent American author. The novel is known for its well-developed characters and is regarded a masterpiece by many scholars. The story is primarily focused on an individual named Jay Gatsby and his relationships with Daisy Buchanan.

Society’s norms for how people behave based on their gender have changed over the years. Conforming to these norms often make one feel accepted by society, while being one’s own self could lead them to become an outcast. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays how these gender norms affect whether one leans towards self-happiness or acceptance. Set in the 1920s in the area around New York City, Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, relays his entanglement in the affair between his second cousin once removed, Daisy Buchanan, and his neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Daisy, a married woman with a child, experiments with love elsewhere, turning to her past lover, Gatsby, in a time when women were supposed to be obedient, pure, and virtuous.

These show that while Daisy knows and expects that everybody must love and be drawn to her; the fact that she said those things to her cousin only proves that she has no thought for the future and the problems that may rise from influencing everyone to flock around her under false pretenses. Instead, Daisy is content to sit back and watch the chaos she invoked, comforted with the knowledge that she cannot help the fact that all the men love her. Afterall, she didn’t force them to be love her in her opinion. In contrast, the original telling of the story written by Fitzgerald gradually reveals to the readers the process in which Daisy is slowly dismantled from her facade of angelic perfection, and revealed as a much more deep and complex character, encompassing her greed, snobbery, carelessness and pettiness to say the least. When first reading The Great Gatsby, the original impression of Daisy Buchanan is innocence.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, characters have very distinct identities that develop throughout the book and many inferences are needed to understand the characters. One example of this is Daisy Buchanan. Daisy Buchanan cares greatly about wealth and is a very careless person. Throughout the novel, many of her decisions are due to her greed and carelessness, even though those decisions may not be the best decisions for her. Daisy displays her greed throughout the novel; she marries Tom Buchanan because of his wealth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, is full of themes of wealth, love, and tragedy, as well as a subtle but powerful representation of gender. During the time this book was written, women’s suffrage had begun, so women were taking their first steps towards equality with men. The three main women characters in the novel - Daisy Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson, and Jordan Baker- all have things in common but can be vastly different; they reflect both man and society’s view of women in the early 20th century. The Great Gatsby portrays the characters Daisy, Myrtle, and Jordan as stereotypes of women during the 1920s, which is shown through their behavior, beliefs, and ultimate fates and their personalities display both powerful and potentially harmful stereotypes of women at this time.

When Daisy appears for the first time in the book, the author associates her character with light, purity and innocence. With her dress, “they were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering”(8), she

F. Scott Fitzgerald has a way of applying indirect characterization into his novels in order to enhance how he would like a character to be interpreted, especially in his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. Take for example, two major characters in the story, Nick Carraway of Minnesota who moved to New York in order to get into the bond business and Tom Buchanan a wealthy man living in East Egg with his wife Daisy. It is evident that Fitzgerald would want readers to look at Nick as an honest man and a bystander or observer of the world going on around him. On the other hand, Fitzgerald wants readers to see Tom as an arrogant, hypocritical brute with no morals whatsoever.

Fitzgerald in the novel, uses careless individuals who would destroy everything and everyone and yet still manage to retreat back to their money. Daisy Buchanan, the ‘golden girl’ is rather dishonest and deceitful throughout the novel. As she starts having her affair with Gatsby, she creates unrealistic expectations in Gatsby head about their future together. As Gatsby is having drinks at the Buchanan’s, Tom leaves the room and Daisy kisses Gatsby and declares, ‘I don’t care!’ At this point, the audience realizes that Daisy is and always was in love with Gatsby and that she was prepared to leave Tom.

Throughout the story Daisy has been lying about who she loved when she knew that she was still in love with “ Great Gatsby” and that showed when daisy read that letter, she was hysterically crying, it showed that she still cared but she didn't want to put herself out there. She could've fooled everyone with her love lies but she sure couldn't fool “ Great Gatsby”. Tom fell for all these lies, makes Daisy and Gatsby deceitful. This novel is full of love, lies and deceit.

In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Daisy is portrayed as a modern woman; she is sophisticated, careless and beautifully shallow. Daisy knows who she is, and what it takes for her to be able to keep the lifestyle she grew up in, and this adds to her carelessness and her feigned interest in life. In all, Daisy is a woman who will not sacrifice material desires or comfort for love or for others, and her character is politely cruel in this way. Daisy’s main strength, which buoyed her throughout her youth and when she was in Louisville, is her ability to know what was expected of her and feign cluelessness.

The novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates a morally ambiguous character that can’t be defined as strictly good or evil. Moral ambiguity is the driving force towards Gatsby’s actions. The character Gatsby demonstrates morally ambiguous qualities that initiate plot throughout the whole novel. Morally ambiguous choices can be viewed towards Gatsby’s character throughout the novel. The first glimpse of Gatsby is introduced in the first chapter while Nick is “exempting him from his reaction” of a “uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever” already placing Gatsby in a position of moral ambiguity (Fitzgerald 2).

Daisy is an ignorant woman, she destroys Gatsby’s dream and felt no guilt in leaving him. She feels safe as long as she had her money. She uses her money to cover up her wrong doings. Her ignorance and carelessness cause her to not understand the hard work behind the American

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most prominent authors of the last century. Famous for works like “This Side of Paradise”, “Tender Is the Night” and a number of other short stories, novellas and novels, he is often inspired by his own personal life and experience. A considerable part of his pieces tackle questions regarding social status, rise to power and how they correlate to love and “The Great Gatsby” is one of them. This particular novel takes place in the year 1922 in New York and the fictional villages of East and West Egg and is seen through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a writer and not particularly successful bonds salesman. It tells the story of the affair (and the events preceding it) of Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby but also includes