In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald illustrates the concept of a dream as something wanted so badly, but cannot ever come true. He demonstrates this concept in many of his characters. These characters are so simple that they are complicated. They want something so badly yet they act like they don't want it only because they know that they can never have it. Fitzgerald characters are so petty, and small-minded. .
Gatsby is a man with, as he sees it, an attainable dream. He wishes to re-create the past. This of course is so impossible that he seems nave to even consider it. Gatsby's brain is so freakishly devoured by this dream, that he believes that it is possible. He even goes out of his way just to be near Daisy. "Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay." (p 56, Fitzgerald.) Fitzgerald made this character this way so it is likely that the reader knows the attainable dream. Gatsby does not try to hide behind his dream, after he speaks with his love, he does not try and hide their affair from her husband. .
Daisy is a whole other character. She secretly wants two things. She wants Tom, yet she loves Gatsby. " 'Oh you want too much!' she cried to Gatsby. 'I love you now-isn't that enough I did love him once-but I loved you too." (p 140, Fitzgerald). She is such a shallow woman that it is hard to see past the little brains that she does have. She does not want to re-create the past because she likes her life the way it is, having Gatsby just as a lover, but being able to come back to her family. When she leaves with her family, she does not even give Gatsby a second thought, nor does she care. She is such an in-decisive woman.
Myrtle is in love with Tom, yet she hides this secret desire from her husband. Her husband is so foolishly in love that he does not even second guess that his wife is cheating on him. She is blinded by the dream that Tom will leave Daisy, and convinced that he will do so.