20th Century New York, everyone was looking for the American Dream, Gatsby was one of the millions just like everyone else. He started out being a "no one" to becoming a wealthy man who held parties every weekend at his mansion in the the West Egg which he did in order to get attention from the love of his life. He could never stop loving Daisy who had married Tom while he was at war. He used his bitter past of losing Daisy's heart to motivate himself to become a rich man and win Daisy's heart back again. While his past drove his motivations to move forward, his feelings still remained in the past. He could not stop loving Daisy even when he knew that nothing can bring her back into her arms. As a result of his obsession of the past, he had lost his identity, and in the end shot to death.
The past encourages us to move forward to achieve something that we could not have in the past. But the fact that we can not actually go back to the past makes us want to go back to the past even more. We become so obsessed and attached to the past that emotionally, we find ourselves stuck back where we started from.
