The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a novel published in 1925. The
narrator of the book is Nick Carraway, a young man who recently moves to West Egg, Long Island near New York City. The book tells the dramatic affairs that happen around Nick and his millionaire neighbor, Gatsby. Set in New York, the economic center of America, the book portrays many attractive elements of the era of the Roaring ‘20s and the chaos and cold- bloodedness of the people from the upper class. Throughout the book, the distinctive traits of each character uniquely contribute to the building of the story.

Gatsby, as the protagonist of this book, is portrayed as a persistent and faithful man.
Coming from a poor midwestern family, he fights and strives to become rich, for he wants to marry Daisy, his love during his youth, with dignity. Years later, he finally becomes rich but finds out that Daisy has already married somebody else. Still, he insists on buying a house near to where she lives and holds a party every day, just to get even a little attention from her. His love towards Daisy is destined to be tragic. As Nick observes, “there must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but
because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.” His transformation from a poor man to a
member of the upper class is so dramatic that Daisy cannot adapt. He thinks their relationship would be the same as before, but he ignores the fact that Daisy is already married to Tom, and they can never go back to the way before.

Daisy is a major female character in the book, who possesses contradiction in her
character traits. She appears to be pretty, elegant, and innocent, but there is clearly something more hiding within her identity. To build Daisy’s persona, Fitzgerald specifically focuses on her voice. At the beginning of the book, Nick’s comments it is, “the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.” Her attractiveness to men is fully captured in the description of her voice. Later in the book, however, Gatsby says, “Her voice is full of money,” which reveals the dark side in her
character, which is her vanity and her yearning for the rich.

After watching all the dramas unfold among the people around him, Nick’s attitude
towards his ideal lifestyle changes. At the very end of the book, he exclaims that, “I see now
that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” This quote conceives Nick’s helplessness that he still cannot immerse into the American Eastern lifestyle he once desired. He considers himself still more suited to the traditional Western lifestyle where people are not as rich or fast-paced but much happier.

Overall, I strongly recommend reading The Great Gatsby, as the plot is highly compact
and exciting. The distinctive character traits of the different characters in the book contribute
to its appeal and its designation as an American classic novel. There are a lot of intriguing mysteries that are not revealed at the beginning, and along with the development of the plot, I intensely feel the helplessness that Fitzgerald intends to convey to his readers through his portrayal of the characters.