Book Guides. Love, desire, and sex are a major motivators for nearly every character in The Great Gatsby. However, none of Gatsby's five major relationships is depicted as healthy or stable.
So what can we make of this? Is Fitzgerald arguing that love itself is unstable, or is it just that experiencing love and desire the way the characters do is problematic? Gatsby's portrayal of love and desire is complex. We will also note how each relationship develops through the story, the power dynamics involved, and what each particular relationship seems to say about Fitzgerald's depiction of love. We will also include analysis of important quotes for each of the five major couples.
Finally, we will go over some common essay questions about love, desire, and relationships to help you with class assignments. Our citation format in this guide is chapter. We're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book. To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it Paragraph beginning of chapter; middle of chapter; on: end of chapter , or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text.
We will discuss the romantic pairings in the novel first through the lens of marriage. Then we will turn our attention to relationships that occur outside of marriage.
Tom and Daisy Buchanan were married in , three years before the start of the novel. They both come from incredibly wealthy families, and live on fashionable East Egg, marking them as members of the "old money" class. As Jordan relates in a flashback, Daisy almost changed her mind about marrying Tom after receiving a letter from Gatsby an earlier relationship of hers, discussed below , but eventually went through with the ceremony "without so much as a shiver" 4.
