"THE GREAT GATSBY'S DREAMS"
Compassion by Mercedes Rodriguez Gomez
Dreams are made for accomplish them but sometimes the desire to get them make us commit selfish acts
In this book all the characters are pursuing a dream. Some of them succeed but others just have a completely different ending.
What is compassion?
We are going to analyze this feeling in two characteres of The Great Gatsby
Jay Gatsby
In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is a self-made man who started out with no money, only a plan for achieving his dream. He is so blinded by his luxurious possessions that he does not see that money can not buy love or happiness. Fitzgerald demonstrates how a dream can become corrupted by one’s focus on acquiring wealth, power, and expensive things.
His dream was have Daisy by his side and live a life away from Tom. Jay Gatsby had a dream, be with Daisy forever, and he was motivated that he could do something to convince Daisy to leave Tom to be with him. He lost his compassion.
"It was a strange coincidence," I said. "But it wasn’t a coincidence at all." "Why not?" "Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay." (Fitzgerald 137-140).Gatsby was willing to do everything in his power, and gradually he lost his compassion, as well as his humanity.
Tom Buchanan
So Tom is the opposite pole of Gatsby, he thinks he needs to feel compassion about almost everything, about people from valley of ashes, black people or his own wife.
Modern World
We lived this horrible situation only a few days ago. This time were innocent elementary school children in Connecticut. As we can listen from Obama's mouth: " These children will never live a graduation or going to the college"
It is a case of lack of compassion, not as serious and with the same consequences than in The Great Gatsby but still based of the compassion definition we had on top.
Attaining a dream
I believe strongly when you want something you will need to fight to get it, but there are some limits.
Only worth getting your dream to get there if you have based on your principles and have been true to yourself.
Only each of us know how much are we willing to sacrifice to reach our goals.
Finally Gatsby gave his life for his love to Daisy, and Tom got Daisy but she did not love him
They self-destructed their dreams.