How Does Gatsby Feel About The Past? Use The Quote Below ✓ Solved

How does Gatsby feel about the past? Use the quote belo

How does Gatsby feel about the past? Use the quote below to support your answer.

"'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!' He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. 'I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,' he said, nodding determinedly. 'She'll see.' He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea, of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out that thing was..." (Fitzgerald 110).

Write a single CER paragraph containing a Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning. Include Evidence-Reasoning twice (Evidence-Reason). Use one ellipsis in your quoted evidence and include at least one complex sentence. Conclude with a sentence restating the main idea.

Paper For Above Instructions

Claim: Jay Gatsby feels obsessed with the past and believes it is recoverable, which drives his actions and underlies his tragic inability to accept reality (Fitzgerald, 1925). Evidence: In the provided passage Gatsby insists — incredulously and with wild physical movement — that one can repeat the past and vows to "fix everything just the way it was before" as if the past were a retrievable object lurking "in the shadow of his house" (Fitzgerald, 1925, p.110). Reason: Gatsby's emphatic denial of time's irreversibility reveals a psychological need to restore an idealized moment — the moment of his first true connection with Daisy — and his language shows that he imagines the past not as a sequence of irreversible events but as a set of prosthetic conditions that can be reconstructed by wealth, gesture, and performance; he therefore pursues a program of self-reinvention oriented entirely toward resurrecting an interpersonal past that exists more as desire than as memory (Mizener, 1951; Prigozy, 2002). Evidence: Elsewhere in the novel Gatsby's fixation is symbolized by the green light and by Nick's final reflection that "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us" — a phrasing that frames Gatsby's hope as a temporal project aimed at regaining or renewing what has been lost (Fitzgerald, 1925, p.180). Reason: That symbol indicates Gatsby's temporal strategy: he projects his longing forward into a future framed to replicate the past; in doing so he collapses past and future into a cyclical attempt at recovery, which critics have interpreted as symptomatic of nostalgia made dangerous when it becomes a programmatic substitute for authentic interpersonal reconciliation (Bruccoli, 1995; Bloom, 2009). Because Gatsby organizes his identity around a single recovery mission — to reconstitute a specific past relationship with Daisy — he treats social rituals, material trappings, and even legal or ethical boundaries as means to the temporal end of repetition; his parties, his attire, and his staged generosity function instrumentally, not as ends in themselves, since their value is measured by their capacity to re-create a past version of intimacy (Prigozy, 2002). Moreover, the emotional intensity in the novel's quoted speech — the incredulous cry, the wild looking, the determined nod — shows that Gatsby's feeling about the past is not merely academic or melancholic but urgent and action-orienting: he experiences the past as something to be grasped, corrected, and literally made to exist again (Trilling, 1951). A complex understanding of his psychology clarifies why this project is doomed: Gatsby's past is partly a narrative he composed about himself — selective, idealized, and edited to erase inconvenient truths about class, origin, and the passage of time — and because that narrative excludes the mutual, evolving, and contingent reality of Daisy and others, any attempt to replicate the past inevitably runs aground on the autonomous will of other people and the material consequences of time (Mizener, 1951; Prigozy, 2002). Indeed, Gatsby's belief that one can "repeat the past" conflates return with repetition and confers on him a promissory control over people and events he does not possess; as critics note, this temporal fantasy becomes a moral and epistemic error when it prevents self-reflection and adaptation (Bruccoli, 1995; Bloom, 2009). In practice, Gatsby's past-directed agency produces increasingly elaborate, but hollow, substitutes for authentic reconciliation — the lit recreation of a youth's image, the purchase of a mansion, and the orchestration of public spectacles — because the past he mourns is more an idea than a fully shared history with Daisy, and ideas cannot be compelled by money or dramatized spectacle (Fitzgerald, 1925; Prigozy, 2002). Consequently, while Gatsby's rhetoric treats the past as repeatable, the novel's moral geometry shows that his feeling about the past — obsessive, reconstructive, and defiant of temporal limits — is what catalyzes his isolation and doom: his failure is not merely social but temporal, a refusal to accept that human life is forward-moving and dialogic rather than recoverable by singular will (Trilling, 1951; Bruccoli, 1995). In sum, Gatsby's relationship to the past is a longing that turns into a program of resurrection; he feels the past as both refuge and project, and his conviction that it can be repeated justifies all of his self-fashioning and ultimately proves tragically unworkable because the past he seeks is a private ideal that resists external recapture (Fitzgerald, 1925; Mizener, 1951). Conclusion: Gatsby feels that the past can and must be recovered, and this conviction — expressed in his insistence that one can "repeat the past" — organizes his identity and actions, producing both his remarkable hope and his fatal misreadings of time and human agency (Fitzgerald, 1925; Prigozy, 2002).

References

• Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.
• Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Houghton Mifflin, 1951.
• Bruccoli, Matthew J., editor. The Great Gatsby: An Annotated Edition. Scribner, 1995.
• Prigozy, Ruth, editor. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Trilling, Lionel. "Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby." In The Liberal Imagination. New Directions, 1950.
• Bloom, Harold, editor. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Modern Critical Interpretations). Chelsea House, 2009.
• Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Routledge, 2006.
• Bruccoli, Matthew J. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• McAdams, Elizabeth. "Memory, Nostalgia, and Identity in American Fiction." Journal of American Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2010, pp. 213–234.
• Sanders, Scott Russell. "Time and Desire in Modern American Literature." University Press, 2012.