The Great Gatsby tells Gatsby's story of getting Daisy back to his life. It is a tragedy that Gatsby uses his own life to exchange for an “impractical” dream. For five years, Gatsby has struggled to get Daisy back to his side. But in the end, Daisy chose to be with Tom because Tom’s money comes from a formal source. Tom and Daisy pushed all the main responsibility for the accident to Gatsby. Many people understand this book that Gatsby's life dream is a dream of love, which eventually fails because Daisy is a materialist, but let us reinterpret the entire plot. Gatsby’s failure is a result of the unrealistic desire for an unreachable social class.
 
Gatsby is from a peasant family. However, the young Gatsby tries to eliminate the influence of his background, therefore never admitting that he is the son of two farmers. He longs to get rid of poverty and believes that he could join the upper class through hard work. He designs a schedule for himself to achieve full efficiency, “Rise from bed—6:00, Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling—6:15-6:30…” He sets goals for himself which he believes are the key to success. For instance: “No wasting time at Shifters or…” From these two quotes, we can see that he is a positive young man. He has a step-to-step plan to get himself out of poverty and to the top social classes. During this process, he also changes his name from Gatz to Gatsby to show that his desire for transformation from the bottom to the top.
 
The appearance of Cody in the text has a great effect on Gatsby's growth. When Gatsby is young, he runs into Cody, who gives Gatsby his first job. Gatsby admired him very much and his luxurious money-spending habits deeply impacted Gatsby. Gatsby followed Cody in focusing his ideals on obtaining wealth. During this time, Gatsby's approach to success changed, from achieving success through hard work to developing a temptation for money. He now believed that money could bring him to a higher social class. Cody represents everything Gatsby wants. The young Gatsby knew his poverty and developed a strong obsession with accumulated wealth and status. Gatsby's remodeling behavior symbolized his desire to abandon his low-class identity and cast himself into the rich man he imagined.
 
However, when Gatsby was finally close to becoming a member of the upper class, he faced rejection. His birth had become an obstacle for him to enter the upper class and money could not eliminate such a background. The incident triggered rumors of the so-called celebrities of the upper class. When the fake message of how Gatsby earned his money spread in Gatsby’s luxurious banquet, the boredom of those noble people and the vicious impression ruined Gatsby’s pursuit of his dream. None of the people at his party ate and drank at Nick's funeral after his death. These two events formed a huge contrast, showing that Gatsby was still a farmer in the eyes of the upper class, and he could not receive the respect he wanted from the upper class.
 
At the end of the book, the author used a sentence to describe Gatsby’s life, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This sentence could not be more suitable to describe Gatsby's life. Gatsby spent his entire life trying to reach the upstream or the higher social class, but when he was swimming in the water, his past became the indestructible wave that rolled him back. No matter how much money and effort Gatsby spent on changing his destiny, these waves could not be eliminated easily. Until the end, Gatsby still tried to swim forward persistently. However, at this time, he sacrificed his life, and, of course, his dreams of money and love.