Nick Carraway And Jay Gatsby

Throughout The Great Gatsby is very evident that both Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby want to find the same thing. They are both searching for love, which seems to be so elusive towards them in life. While going about their search in slightly different manners; Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby nevertheless are searching for the same thing in life but ultimately are unable to achieve their desires.

Both Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby are similar to one another because they wanted to find love in their lives. As seen in the novel both Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby fantasized about encounters that they wish to have had or have had with women. Nick Carraway recalls thinking to himself:

I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes. . . .(56).

This passage clearly shows Nick Carraway’s desire to have a companion who he can love and spend quality time with. In addition to Nick’s thoughts, Jay Gatsby also fantasizes about encounters with women:

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (110-111)

This passage brings to light the strong desire that Jay Gatsby had to find someone that he could share his love with; in this case that person is Daisy. However, while Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby both desire the same thing in life they both go about trying to obtain their desire in different ways.

The narrator of our story, Nick Carraway goes about trying to obtain his desire in more of a reserved way rather than aggressively pursuing love. This can be seen by the fact that Nick is never completely sure about whether or not he loves Jordan Baker, the main women in his life. This uncertainty can be seen when Nick describes his interest in Jordan by saying “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt sort of a tender curiosity” (57). However after some conversation with Jordan we see that Nick has other feelings for Jordan:

Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her…I had been writing letters once a week and signing them: “Love, Nick,” and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip (58).

These two passages bring to light the confused feelings that Nick has regarding his desires. We see in one that he only has a “tender curiosity” for Jordan whereas in the next passage we see that Nick think that he loves her. However as we find out later in the novel Nick ends relationship with Jordan, who said that he had been right that she would one day meet with someone as careless as her and that she had and that it was him. He was half in love with her but he could not get passed his feelings of indecisiveness in regards to his “love” for Jordan.

In contrast to Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby goes about trying to obtain his desire in more of a reckless abandon sort of way. Jay Gatsby is not reserved in his love for Daisy; rather he is immediately influenced after becoming reacquainted with her:

I went in after making every possible noise in the kitchen…they were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears, and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room (89).

From this moment on Jay Gatsby becomes utterly obsessed with Daisy and he has obtained sort of a blind-love for Daisy. We are able to see Gatsby’s strong obsession for Daisy in a description by Nick Carraway:

He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs…he was consumed with wonder at her presence (91).

This passage clearly shows how obsessed Gatsby had become with Daisy; Gatsby no longer believes that he is alone rather he believes that he has found his love and fulfilled his desire. However as we find out later in the novel Gatsby was a victim to “blind love.” He was a man of dreams and imagination and he lived in the smeared haze of his own imagination never truly noticing the reality that existed. He allowed for his dreams take control of his life, he believed too much in them which ultimately led him to his tragic death in the end. He was unable to see what everyone else saw in him: that he was alone and lonely and that people were only using him for personal gain and that his dreams and desires never had any real true chance of becoming reality because they were based on a blind-love that existed solely in his mind: Daisy’s love.

After analyzing Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, we are able to see that they both had strong desires to obtain love in their life. We see that each went about chasing love in different manners. However, both manners used proved ultimately to be failed attempts at love. Both Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby aspirations for love fell short and both characters were unable to have success in achieving what they had set out to find: love that could be shared with a significant other.