Quotation Analysis

"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dream--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart" (Fitzgerald 96).

After loosing Daisy to Tom, Gatsby spent his life trying to win her back in his delusions, building her and her love up in his mind for years with no reality to keep his expectations real along the way, resulting in an affair that started out as little more than a crush and some romance and ended up being a perfect relationship; or, at least, what he thought in the years that she was gone. Gatsby never stopped to get to know Daisy and see if and how she's changed over time, instead of assuming that she was stuck in the past like he was. He just assumed she would love him because everything he had he got for her, so how could she not be with his? He created this perfect image of her, though, one that came from his memories of the past and his imagination, continually adding more delightful perfections to his fanciful fabrication, "...adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way" (Fitzgerald 96). She continually disappointed him, not through any failure on her part, but only because of his standards of perfection were unattainable "...Daisy tumble[d] short of his dream--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion...It had gone beyond her" (Fitzgerald 96). Despite creating these impossible standards for her, he won't accept the truth that she is not everything that he imagines she is, everything that he has spent his entire, empty, life working towards, no matter how many times she made fall short of his standards; "No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart" (Fitzgerald 96).

"I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees" (Fitzgerald 161). 

In the last moments prior to his death, Gatsby realizes the life that he wasted on Daisy, that he "paid a high price for living too long with a single dream"; everything he did was for the singular goal of getting Daisy and now, with his life about to come to end, he finally sees the emptiness of his life when he focused everything on Daisy, that in his obsessive life style over her, he never accomplished anything; he never gained anything for himself because it was all for Daisy in a continual effort to impress her (Fitzgerald 161). Fitzgerald then continues to describe the new, terrifying, world, loveless and lacking that infinite hope he had always held onto, until now, when he realized that Daisy didn't love him; "[a] new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about..." (Fitzgerald 161). The world without his infinite hope and love for her suddenly seemed hideous; things that had once been beautiful in his eyes suddenly seemed repulsive and harsh, like "what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass"; he felt exposed now without Daisy dancing in front of his eyes, leading him down a one-way road, a road that only had room for her, but now that he is being "reborn" as himself--as James Gatz and Jay Gatsby, two poor boys finally merging into one renewed man, the yellow sunlight of the false life he had created began to quickly corrode his new person and he couldn't see how to fit back into his gaudy life comfortably anymore. Gatsby is described as a hopeless romantic of infinite hope in his love for Daisy, but here Fitzgerald shows how infinitely false his hope was in Daisy, allowing the reader to witness the shattering of Gatsby's infinite false hope and to experience the world without hope, how strangely twisted and cruel it can suddenly look after years of infinite beauty.