"In literature as in life, romance can be both a great driving force and a foolish obsession." What does this mean to you and do you agree with it?

"In literature as in life, romance can be both a great driving force and a foolish obsession." In life, there are people who do crazy things for love. Similarly in literature such as "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it can be seen how romance can be a great driving force and a foolish obsession through the character Jay Gatsby. Romance is indeed a great driving force and also a foolish obsession in retrospection. As a reader, we see Gatsby as foolish but pursuing Daisy is all that matter to him.

Gatsby is man who lives in a mansion in West Egg, Long Island, right next to the narrator, Nick Carraway. Gatsby loves Daisy. Daisy is Nick’s second cousin, and also happens to be married to Tom Buchanan. Gatsby and Daisy were together before the great war. But when Gatsby was drafted, Daisy married Tom because he had money. Gatsby comes back from the war and he becomes rich. He hadn’t seen Daisy for about five years.. He loves Daisy so much, that he has to win her back. The only way to do that is through money. He had to make a lot of it and he had to make it fast. It took him three years to become rich through crime. He then took that money to buy a house directly across Daisy’s house. Right across it, is the green light from her house shining into Gatsby house. Gatsby throws a party nearly every week, hoping that Daisy would show up. He doesn’t know how to socialise and because of that rumors spread around about this mysterious man. He uses Nick to get to Daisy. Gatsby tells him a whole bunch of lies. He says his family lived in the Midwest and when asked to be more specific, he says San Francisco. Nick sees through this but he agrees to help him out because he pities Gatsby. Gatsby finally gets to see Daisy after all these years. Gatsby does doubt that this will work but he still attempts to "fix everything just the way it was before".

Gatsby has done all this because of romance. The great driving force that drove him to those foolish obsessions is loneliness. There is something lacking in his house. With Daisy in it with Gatsby, it is complete. Gatsby is also living in the past. He wants everything to be the way it used to be before. Nick says "some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then." It’s his love for Daisy which is ineffable that drives him into doing stupid things like crime and being someone that he is not.

In conclusion, we can see how "In literature as in life, romance can be both a great driving force and a foolish obsession". Gatsby does all these crazy things to win Daisy’s love back. But yet in the end, he doesn’t get anything. Rather than dwell in the past, if Gatsby moved on, he would not have had such tragic

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