The Great Gatsby Self Analysis

Scott F Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby (1925), captures the idea about the lengths a person will go to too change their entire personality and background as they believed that the life they previously had was not their destiny and wanted to better themselves. The Great Gatsby is an example of when a character has met their demise due to their obsession on changing themselves to what they perceived as their ideal self. The self is what distinguishes you as a person. It’s your personality, identity and persona. However Jacques Lacan’s theorizes that idea of self is imaginary. That it is not a coherent thing. Lacan’s theorizes that it is instead a failure to identify ‘I’ from the other. A product of identification which we have created to identify ourselves with other people. It is how we perceive ourselves and others and can be changed depending on the experiences we have in our lifetime.
Self as a concept was described by Professor Roy Baumeister as ‘the individual 's belief about himself or herself, including the person 's attributes and who and what the self-is’ . Baumeister created this description of self as a concept due to Dr Michael Lewis’s idea that the concept of self has two parts. The Existential self and the Categorical self. The existential self-stage starts when a child

His naivety that Daisy will once again love him as well as his stubborn personality and his belief that a person can ‘repeat the past’ plays a key part in Gatsby’s death. He is so blinded by his dreams of wealth and glamour that he fails to distinguish Daisy’s true feelings for him. Daisy complains, ‘Oh, you want too much’ which highlights Gatsby’s greed and ambition for wealth. He wants more than Daisy’s love. He wants society to believe and accept his fakery; he wants to achieve ‘thoroughness’ and ‘realism’ in his story. Daisy exclaims that she ‘loves’ Gatsby but to him that ‘isn 't enough’