A Lifetime of Perceived Reality

Everyone has moments when you put up veils to either hide, or feel comfort in a situation. We all even sometimes focus on past events to aid our put-on-faces. It sounds natural to periodically take part in this, but imagine if you became so consumed with you illusioned face you took part in this for years on end. After a period of time you would no longer be able to tell your created image from your true image- So you’d turn to what you do know that can be altered just as your image, you would turn to past memories. You’d convince yourself that whatever you had in the past could easily be obtained in the present, which is not true (sp. 2). This is the situation of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Each of these characters from the story The Great Gatsby (F.Scott Fitzgerald) constantly put up facades, and when distinction between actuality and desire became meshed they became abnormal, and a sure price was to be paid for unwittingly turning to the past. Theses two characters told a fact that’s to last a lifetime- putting up veils for too long, while living in a parallel universe and prior times will lead to your permanent extinction, eternally altered, or utterly lost when actuality apprehends you.(sp.3)

Jay Gatsby, the torn man who envisioned himself into “James Gatz”, who at seventeen invented and transformed himself into Jay Gatsby” (Telgen 67). Gatsby was a man who hid under facades, lived for them sometimes blindly.(Sp.4) This Caused him to unconsciously process “double vision” -(Telgen65) Meaning he saw in two sets of eyes his uncontrolled natural ones, and his robotic cloaked ones.(sp.5) The Cloaked set (which he could control at this point) distracted him from the present state of Daisy. The realization that the girl he “loved” was not the golden image he perfected numerous times with memories of his constructed past. He failed to comprehend that he was only in love with the illusion he had created years ago. He allowed these memories to drive him and push him toward things he didn’t understand he could never have. Daisy’s faint crystal memories obsessively drove him “toward the green light” (Fitzgerald 13), in which nourished and protected the fragile, attained Daisy. Jay “Gatsby brought [a] House so that Daisy would be just across the bay” (Fitzgerald 147) .