Mourning for the loss of a loved one is a normal process that almost everyone experiences at a particular stage in life. However, when people do not clearly understand their losses, sorrow can be purged through unhealthy obsessions. Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby centers on Jay Gatsby’s dream of winning Daisy Buchanan’s heart and the self-image he wants to display. However, when the war prevents Gatsby from seeing her, he unconsciously carries this loss for five years, and his dream transforms into a detrimental infatuation where he attempts to retrieve Daisy. As Gatsby lives in an illusion, he uses ostentation to attract Daisy and create a false impression in society, oblivious that it is not his pursuit of love but rather that of grief for his lost love object – Daisy before the war. Through Gatsby’s quest to win Daisy and become whom he envisions, Fitzgerald reflects Sigmund Freud’s concepts of melancholia in response to an unconscious loss and how pathological mourning can take inconspicuous forms.

As a penurious war veteran, Gatsby loves Daisy because her wealth and status attract him. In their short romance, Gatsby sees the qualities he lacks in Daisy - money, popularity, and love - as his parents are “shiftless and unsuccessful farm people” and therefore targets Daisy to resolve his insecurities about his low social class (Fitzgerald 105). However, with Daisy, he “didn’t despise himself” and instead “intended... to take what he could and go,” but he realizes he “felt married to her” because she embodies everything Gatsby yearns for but could not attain (159). For instance, she gleams “like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” (160). Gatsby knows he reflects these “hot struggles” in his moneyless state and risks being “blown anywhere about the world” since he enlists to serve in the war but still indulges in a romantic affair with Daisy (159-160). His churning desires diminish his practicality, and Daisy temporarily relieves him of the idea that he is poor. However, when “she vanishe[s] into her rich house, into her rich, full life,” Gatsby is left with nothing - a reminder that he is financially unstable and inconsequential to others - and thus longs to be with her forever (160). Daisy’s presence makes him feel worthy and significant and allows him to idealize her character and his potential life if they married. Therefore, on the surface, Gatsby’s relationship with Daisy seems to reflect powerful love, but attributing Daisy as his love object, or whom he is dependent for affection, serves as a defense mechanism to cope with the fact that he is not wealthy or prominent (“Love Object”).

When the war inevitably summons Gatsby, Daisy’s absence oppresses him, and he is unaware that he permanently loses Daisy when she marries Tom because Gatsby believes she is still achievable. The interruption of the war causes him to lose his love object and inadvertently aggravates his psychological state. Gatsby should know that continuing the affair is impossible considering his impoverished position and unpredictable conditions in the military, but regardless he promises to return and tries “frantically to get home but some complication...sent him to Oxford instead” (161). He senses the “quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters,” but he absurdly hopes that Daisy will understand and wait for his return because he needs her presence to feel secure (161). However, the pressures of societal expectations as a woman in the 1920s outweigh Daisy’s love for Gatsby, and she marries Tom to settle into a luxurious lifestyle. Instead of moving on in life, Gatsby defends her disloyalty as ‘“she might have loved [Tom], just for a minute, when they were first married—and loved me more even then, do you see’” (162). Though Gatsby professes his love and rejects Daisy loving someone more than him, he admits to Nick, “‘Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life’” (71). Gatsby’s perception of the war evinces the beginning of his depression and dissatisfaction with life due to Daisy’s absence. When death eludes Gatsby, however, he views his life as “enchanted” now that he can lament his loss by pursuing his Daisy in the wish to find the confidence and security he briefly felt five years ago.

Gatsby is blind to his dream’s hopelessness since he does not know his loss or that he is unconsciously grieving for it. His disoriented pursuit further correlates with the notion, “the object...has been lost as an object of love...one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and ...cannot consciously perceive what he lost either” because Gatsby does not outwardly realize that he loses Daisy forever, and consequently his defense mechanism; he believes they remain united even though Daisy is married (Freud 245). Even Nick observes Gatsby “wanted to recover something...but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was....” (118). Unknown to Gatsby, he is mourning for the Daisy that existed before he goes to war. Her absence engenders emotional turmoil within him and aggravates his low self-esteem because he cannot feel worthy and respected without her. As a result, after the war bridges a permanent gap between them, Gatsby initiates his lifelong pursuit which he believes to be Daisy’s retrieval, but in reality, is a melancholic response to the lost love object of his past - Daisy.

During Gatsby’s hiatus with Daisy after serving in the war, he endures her absence and endeavors to elevate his social status by engaging in illicit activities. By using his desire for Daisy as an excuse to mitigate the graveness of immorality in his mind as he sacrifices his moral compass for wealth, Gatsby complies with the concept that the “melancholic act of internalization circumscribes the loss and sacrifices the self for its sake” (Ferber 10). He pursue her at the expense of corrupting himself and ignores the potential ramifications, further reflecting the idea that he is “destructively satisfied by his own split tormented interiority, that becomes an expression for his endless loyalty” to Daisy (Ferber 10). When first meeting Daisy, she enkindles Gatsby’s fascination with wealth and prosperity, once felt while assisting Dan Cody, and the “arrangement lasted five years... It might have lasted indefinitely except... a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died” (Fitzgerald 107). Foreshadowed by the finite length of Dan Cody’s success and death, Gatsby is also destined for the same outcome once he takes his lead after the war, though by criminal activities. His depravity sets the path for his inevitable demise as he channels his tempestuous feelings for his loss of Daisy into greediness for wealth and status.

After amassing wealth, Gatsby changes his identity, which he claims to be a means to attain Daisy but is a futile attempt at concealing his insecurities. He changes his name, prompting his illusory lifestyle: “James Gatz—that was really...his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career” (104). Gatsby’s transformation signals his craving to completely dismiss his poor roots and present an artificial upper-class version of himself to Daisy. He invokes pleasure from the mystery and incredulous rumors about him because his authentic identity, which he now resents, is masked by a facade he projects to others: “the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man” (108). His lavish parties exhibit his inner urge to inculcate the impression that he is wealthy and successful to others in society and thus attempts to destroy any remnant of James Gatz. However, in these parties, Gatsby “‘usually find[s] [him]self among strangers because [he] drift[s] here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to [him]’” and “he was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand” (69, 73). His anxious state demonstrates though he is consciously unsure of the cause for his sadness, he unconsciously never forgets. Despite his efforts to become a larger-than-life person, his “heart was in a constant, turbulent riot [and] the most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night,” showing that he continues to be vulnerable to emotional distress because of his unknown loss (106). In response to his writhing turmoil, Gatsby further lowers his self-esteem - a distinct feature of melancholia (Freud 245). He belittles his self-regard as a reaction to his loss of Daisy by exhibiting a different character and manifesting a successful image of himself since he is dissatisfied with his true persona.

In his melancholic pursuit for Daisy, Gatsby fails to escape his illusionary life while being subconsciously trapped in the past because it serves as a harmful catharsis. Since “the absence cannot be replaced by anything since no symbolic mediation will ever be sufficient,” Gatsby “thus gives up the external world” and immerses himself in a fanciful pursuit where he ignores the current conditions (Ferber 10). For instance, Gatsby “kept looking at [Daisy’s] child with surprise” and Nick supposes, “I don't think he had ever really believed in its existence before” (124). Daisy’s child threatens his fantastical state of mind because he cannot place the child anywhere in his past, and hence the child sticks out like a sore thumb in his illusory world. Therefore, he ignores the child and other elements that do not correspond with his past and continues worshipping the delusional image of Daisy as the perfect woman who can assist his elevation to success. However, Gatsby is besotted with his melancholic pursuit and not actually Daisy. For instance, when “Daisy put her arm through his abruptly... possibly it occurred to him that the colossal significance...had now vanished forever... His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one” (100). In other words, Gatsby’s melancholic journey to retrieve Daisy exceeds Daisy herself because it feels relieving to purge his grief for his loss in this way, although it negatively impacts him.

Ultimately, Gatsby dies because he neglects to discern reality and his imprisonment in his pursuit. Nick presumes that though “no telephone message arrived,” in Gatsby’s final moments, “Gatsby...didn’t believe it would come and...must have felt that he had...paid a high price for living too long with a single dream” (172). Nick’s assumption underscores Gatsby’s fixation to his pursuit because in the end, Gatsby is indifferent toward whether his dream is accomplished if he can bemoan his loss through his pursuit. Nick realizes that Gatsby’s single dream cost him to squander his life and inflict harm upon himself. Moreover, it is significant that the person who murders him, Wilson, “was reduced to a man ‘deranged by grief’” (175). Both Wilson and Gatsby are men “deranged by grief,” however, in different ways (175). Wilson acts as a foil to Gatsby and despite the destructive grief he feels over his wife’s death, he is conscious of it, yet Gatsby continues to be unaware of his loss. Either way, Gatsby becomes the prey of his melancholic state and eventually is killed by grief in a literal sense.

Overall, Gatsby’s melancholic journey in The Great Gatsby results in his demise even as he continues to be oblivious to his unconscious loss. However, his attempt at recovery leads him to engage in immoral activities which accentuate his self-destruction. While pursuing Daisy, Gatsby is unaware of the grief for his loss and the reason for his angst which makes his dilemma even more pathetic. The Great Gatsby hence portrays the subtle ways in which melancholia manifests itself and puts forward the concept that loss does not necessarily equate with the death of someone.

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