The Great Gatsby Love Or Obsession?

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Love or Obsession?

Is it love or an obsession that Jay Gatsby has for Daisy Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby? Gatsby’s love for Daisy may have been genuine in the beginning, but it evolves into an overwhelming desire for established wealth and status. Gatsby is a man determined to make something of his life in high society so that he could win back the woman that he lost. Yet when Gatsby says that Daisy's voice is "full of money," he reveals a deeper agenda (Fitzgerald 127). Daisy becomes more than the woman he was in love with--she becomes the incarnation of everything he longed to have in his life: respectability, wealth, status and privilege.

Jay Gatsby was born James Gatz in North Dakota, the son of "shiftless and unsuccessful farm people" (104). With his dreams of wealth and prestige, he wanted to forget about where he came from, "[s]o he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end” (104). The fantasy life that he creates for himself is the start of his journey on the road to success and status. A man named Dan Cody introduces Jay to the finer elements in life ,and from then on he embarks on projects that will make him very wealthy. These "business ventures," however, are not necessarily legal. He uses drug stores as fronts for bootlegging whiskey, which was illegal in those days. His need for wealth and power over-shadows any guilt he may have for his illegal dealings. His obsession is for respect and position in high society. All that Jay Gatsby is concerned with is having enough money to impress Daisy Buchanan and win her away from her husband.

Jay finds out where Daisy and her husband live and moves nearby. They live in East Egg, and he lives across the Long Island Sound in West Egg, “the less fashionable of the two islands off of New York” (9). He can see the dock at D...