Ambition: A confusing road

The style in which characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby conduct their relationships shows how ambition and lack of it causes destruction.
Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby represent opposite ends of the spectrum of ambition towards reaching their goals of a disreputable relationship in The Great Gatsby. Chapter Two introduces the laid back approach Tom takes towards his rumored mistress: “His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew” (Fitzgerald 24). In this passage, words like “sauntered” provide an image of Tom as an airy, careless man who doesn’t take anything too seriously. The word “sauntered” also entails either that Tom doesn’t feel that his relationship with Myrtle requires constant worry and fine-tuning OR that if Myrtle were to leave him, he wouldn’t care. The fact that Tom’s friends “resent” his apparently casual cheating on his wife implies that Tom doesn’t pay much mind to what other people think about him. Contrastingly, Fitzgerald portrays Gatsby as character that lives his life for Daisy, his every move followed through with the thought of Daisy as a determinant of what to do and what not to do. This level of obsession Gatsby has with Daisy is apparent when Jordan informs Nick that Gatsby has “read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy’s name” (Fitzgerald 79). As evident in this quotation, Gatsby has taken an everyday act of reading a newspaper and transformed it into a search for Daisy. The description of Gatsby’s purpose as looking for a “chance of catching a glimpse” proves that Gatsby has every intention and ambition, but no initial rewa...

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... speak her mind and act upon her wishes. However when Myrtle did decide to act upon her decisions, this resulted in her death. After the murder of Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes that “A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb it’s accidental course with its accidental burden” (162). This is noteworthy because the description of the wind that causes a ripple in the otherwise smooth course of Gatsby’s death is described as accidental. Accidental is the opposite of ambitious, so it is apparent that the death of a man of ambition is caused by an accident. What’s to take from this compared Myrtle’s death is that both Myrtle and Gatsby, filled with ambition, died because of an accident, the opposite of ambition. This means that lack of ambition works together with its complementary ambition to cause destruction, a recepie for disaster.