How does the concept of time figure into The Great Gatsby?This is a question for my english class that I'm stuck on. Any ideas?

In The Great Gatsby, time is a
leitmotif that runs throughout the novel.  It is mainly associated with Gatsby and his
quest to repeat the past and reestablish his love affair with
Daisy.

Observe this passage on page 110 regarding
Daisy:

"I
wouldn’t ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can’t repeat the
past."
"Can’t repeat the past?" he cried
incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
He looked
around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his
house, just out of reach of his hand.

"I’m
going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly.
"She’ll see."

Gatsby's goal
is the turn back time, to go back to his boyish days in Louisville when he first met
Daisy, before the war, before she was married, before he became corrupted, back when
America was the idealistic land of opportunity.

Daisy knows
that the past cannot repeat itself.  Nick knows this too.  But, when Gatsby and Daisy
meet at Nick's for the date, Gatsby thinks time is moving backwards.  Observe the
symbolism of the clock:

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Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was
reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of
boredom. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a
defunct mantelpiece clock, and from this position his
distraught eyes stared down at Daisy, who was sitting, frightened but graceful, on the
edge of a stiff chair.

“We've met before,” muttered Gatsby.
His eyes glanced momentarily at me, and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a
laugh. Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his
head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers, and set it back in
place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his
hand.

“I'm sorry about the
clock,” he said.

My own face had now assumed
a deep tropical burn. I couldn't muster up a single commonplace out of the thousand in
my head.

“It's an old clock,” I told them
idiotically.

I think we all believed for a moment that it
had smashed in pieces on the floor.
(86-87)

Overall, the
leitmotif of time shows the false idealism of Gatsby and the American dream.  After
World War I, Fitzgerald says that the innocent, young, boyish America of our past and of
our dreams is changed, corrupted, and no more.