We return determined to change and repair the past. We want to repair the past based on our memories or straighten out our future. It is the desire and need to get rid of negative feelings, replacing them with more positive feelings in order to feel loved. This is a feeling that many of the characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby attempt to achieve. “No amount of fire or cool can challenge what a man stores in his ghostly heart” (Fitzgerald 45-46). The desire to be loved and cared for is a feeling we have always unconsciously yearned for from others, even at the expense of ourselves. Jimmy Gatz wanted to live a life where he was happy with the person he loved and show what he truly cared about. . He never got to get that feeling from his parents. “His parents were inactive, unsuccessful farmers – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents.”(94). Children need some kind of guidance from adults to discover a distinctive character in themselves later. This led Jimmy to create a persona, Jay Gatsby, who twisted him, in order to gain the feeling of love he so desired. “I suppose that name had been ready for a long time... The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, was born from his Platonic conception of himself... So he invented [just what] a seventeen-year-old program . -an old boy would be likely to invent..."(94). His love for himself was not enough to allow him to move forward in time, without the person who helped him embody his new character who had begun to form under the care of Dan Cody He met Meyer Wolfsheim in an effort to return to his love “[Meyer] raised him from nothing…I saw right away that. he was a handsome, gentlemanly young man, and... middle of paper... the promise of a decade of solitude, a shortlist of single men to know, a dwindling briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair” (135) and a decrease in time to do something with his life Nick was the only character who realized what he was doing to himself and Jordan was not healthy for both of them “Gatsby believed in. ...the orgastic future which, year after year, recedes before us. It escaped us then, but it doesn't matter: tomorrow we will run faster, we will extend our arms more… So we move forward, boats against the current, constantly brought back into the past” (180). The past where true love always seems to rest – unattainable, but always something to keep striving for, even as one travels, reluctantly, further and further into the uncertain sea. Works Cited Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Ed. pin. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. Print.