Foolish Love-The Great Gatsby

Foolish love. It is a disease that spreads wide and lays hands on just about every human with affection. Foolish love stems from the inner call of greed and self-fulfillment. The moment a person’s affection because self-seeking and puts themselves over their loved one, they have just became foolish. If this is so, then is not the whole world’s love foolish? A selfless love, or even just a less self-focused love, is it not so hard to achieve? Often times it may start out as a real love, or seem so, as with Jay Gatsby and Daisy. But as the story drives on, an admiration for their love soon turns to a morbid disgust, up to the point that the reader can feel no pity for Gatsby’s end. It’s a conflicting judgement that can only be reflected upon the readers themselves. Fitzgerald recognizes this foolish love, yet evidently in his life, failed to extinguish his own shortcomings. Merely knowing and acknowledging the problem does not always solve the problem itself. Fitzgerald wrote his stories based on his life as an output to his problems, but even they failed to suppress the effects of his foolish love. In the end, Fitzgerald does not even end up with Zelda, reflected and foreshadowed by Gatsby’s separation with Daisy. In a sense, Fitzgerald knew the his own problems, and his own demise, but he failed to solve them and fell into a trap he had already detected. An act of a truly foolish man.