Who Is Daisy Responsible For The Downfall Of Jay Gatsby

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In The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman, characters who strive to be garner acceptance from people in their lives who they trust or respect despite these people's negative influences on them find themselves damaged or disillusioned with the false identity they have tried to make for themselves. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, who has been haunted throughout his five years separated from the love of his life, Daisy, by the notion that a wealthy girl such as herself could never marry a man of his lower economic background, works tirelessly to reinvent himself as a man of wealth and class. Going so far as to buy a mansion “so that Daisy would be just across the bay,” “read[ing] a Chicago paper for years on the chance of catching a glimpse …show more content…

A reality which is immediately apparent when Gatsby who has held Daisy on such a high pedestal and worked so hard to reinvent himself to fit into her social circle is finally reacquainted with Daisy. Despite being intoxicated with his misguided notion that he can, “fix everything just the way it was before,” Gatsby finds that “Daisy tumbled short of his dreams not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.” Like Gatsby, Happy Loman falls victim to inherited expectations for a complete …show more content…

During his long reflection on identity during the prologue to Invisible Man, the narrator introduces his fragile sense of identity and self worth saying, “you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds… You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world,... and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you.” While the narrator states that he feels the need “to convince yourself that you exist in the real world,” the conclusion to this quotation which expresses a desire “to make them recognize you” is revealing of the fact that the narrator truly seeks validation of self in how he is perceived by society. This identification of where the narrator seeks validation frames up the narrator’s quest for approval as he lives his life seeking the validation of society, a journey made even more difficult by the fact that the narrator feels as though he needs to break away from the racist stereotypes that plague his society. The narrator’s desire for societal validation is evident later

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