The Self-Made Man -- “Its members accept the world as they find it and make the best of it . . . Their delight is self-governing: with them asceticism becomes naturalness, necessity, instinct . . . They are the most cheerful, the most amiable." -- Nietzsche
"He was a son of God . . . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be like to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end" (Fitzgerald 98).
THE FATAL FLAW:“What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling [Daisy] what I was going to do?” Consequently, “Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves . . . of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” (Fitzgerald150, 149).
"Gatsby himself didn’t believe [the call] would come, and perhaps he no longer cared.If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream . . . .He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is . . . . (Fitzgerald161)"