Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zaratustra, "One can die of being immortal." This is the philosophy of which Gatsby was living. According to this idea, everybody is in a state between living and dyeing; one can almost call it a dream world. The quality of living is not an absolute; you can never truly be living since the ultimate destination is death. Gatsby thought that "of course you can" repeat the past. Therefore, he must have been living in some sort of dream world where he thought he can just wake up any mourning and just return to the past. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses this idea to create confusion. The reader of this story never really knows the true character of Gatsby, for example, how he got all his money. I believe that Gatsby is an illusion created by Nick and that is the only place that can withhold such a being.
Nick relied on Gatsby's fantasy of living in the past to see the reality of himself in the outside world. Ever since the beginning of the book the reader can tell that Nick is insecure. He calls himself non- judgmental, yet he is one of the most judgmental characters a person can read about. Before Nick wrote this story he was at a tuff time in his life, he fought in WWI and must have considered thinking about the meaning of life. During this identity crisis Nick was left all alone with no one to share his void. This was the perfect opportunity for Nick to create Gatsby.
Gatsby's character had to have been an illusion created by Nick since his personality contradicts itself. The reader learns that after working for Cody, Gatsby's dream was to become rich. Later we see that Gatsby has a dream to pursue Daisy totally disregarding his previous dream. Gatsby's character reflects the mood at which Nick was in at the time. While Nick was in pursuit of Jordan, Gatsby was in pursuit of Daisy. Gatsby "talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that he had gone into loving Daisy"(110).
