Gatsby is a man so desperately hanging onto the hopes and dreams of his past that he convinces himself that by becoming the kind of man that Daisy should theoretically want, he can win her back again despite five years' difference. "Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" And we see his demise as a symbol of his ultimate realization that the past, in fact, cannot be repeated and that what he has been living for all of these years--that his idealized version of himself--is over. Needless to say, Fitzgerald's character development completely fascinates me. Not only that, but Fitzgerald just has a way of wording things in a way that you would never think of but that makes more sense than anything you've known: "He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees."

The Great Gatsby is ultimately a love story. Underneath the elaborate parties and the drinking, it is about the lengths one will go for the person they love. A great classic.