Was Gatsby Really Great

Everybody knows how The Great Gatsby a.k.a Jay Gatsby reached his American Dream brick by brick. We see him throwing those glamorous parties, dazzling the West Egg with his wealth and inspiring a bunch of people. However, beneath the shimmering lights and Gatsby's image, Gatsby lives in an illusion of dreams, success, wealth and most crucially, in the illusion of the dream of "having" Daisy.

A questionable past, a success built on crime, and deception; Gatsby is not like the others who come from old-money and belongs to the old-money elite. Rather, he achieves a success and makes himself "a man" from the scratch yet his success is not build-on genuine achievement. His so-called American Dream is not about the hard work that pays off. 

Despite all his riches, he is an outsider in his own parties and even when he dies, he dies all alone, abandoned by the crowd that does not embrace him but his wealth. Therefore he seems more like a tragic dreamer than a man who achieved the unattainable.

His entire identity is constructed around the illusions that make him cling to the unattainable past with Daisy. His actual, unattainable dream is to have Daisy Buchanan and to create a past that no longer exists by showing off his wealth.

As a prisoner of his own fantasy, Gatsby's illusion shatters the moment he realizes that the idea of Daisy is nothing but a dream that does not have a base in reality. He realizes that she is not the idealized figure he has worshipped for years, and Daisy does not sacrifice her comfort and marriage to be with Jay Gatsby. Here the line between old money and new money becomes clear again; this one-sided love or devotion symbolizes the unattainable dream and the boundaries that could never embrace a new money to the old money side of the world.

In the end, he dies all alone, forgotten, unnoticed, and only having his poor-looking father attending his funeral; which is ironic because no matter how hard he devoted himself to crafting an image of grandeur, he could never have a place on his own in this world he desperately sought to enter, and only his poor-looking father embraced him as a human, a son, a man that dies in emptiness.

Becoming a forgotten figure in a vast world, Jay Gatsby dies tragically, exposing the harsh reality of the American Dream which, when built on illusion, can destroy the individual and lead to disillusionment.