In Great Gatsby, Are character's fates determined by their actions or their histories(inherited circumstances beyond their control)?Do Wilson,...

In his tableau of a frivolous era in America,
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts
several characters who teeter between romantic ideals and cynicism with tragic results. 
Gatsby and Nick are two such characters who miss "the indiscernible barbed wire
between." 

While Gatsby searches for the green light on
Daisy's pier, the symbol of love and money, he struggles between his romantic memories
of Daisy and his cynicism toward the world as he realizes that Daisy may need other
enticements such as parties and beautiful shirts, and a car with "wing-like fenders" to
rekindle her infatuation with him. But, the two elements cannot be reconciled, and in
the New York hotel room when Gatsby tries to coerce Daisy to tell her husband that she
loves him instead, the love of materialism overcomes Daisy, "the king's daughter, the
golden girl...whose voice is rull of money." 

Nick, too,
becomes enamored of Jordan Baker, but his romantic ideals coincide with the amorality of
this detached person who also represents the materialistic era of the 1920s.  Her
haughtiness for Gatsby's parties that are "much too polite for me," and amoral behavior
shatter with cynicism any infatuation that Nick feels: "I'd had enough of all of
them...and suddenly that included Jordan too."

So, in the
end, the characters of Nick, and especially Gatsby, prove to be tragic as they seek the
romanticism of "the old unknown world," picking out "the green light at the end of
Daisy's dock,"

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the green light, the orgastic future that year by
year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, that's no matter--tomorrow we will run
faster, stretch out our arms
farther....

Their ends are
the result of their choices, tragic choices as their ideals collide with the illusionary
Jazz Age.  On one's so-called fate, William Jennings Bryant aptly
remarked,

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Destiny is not a matter of chance, but a matter
of choic.  It is not a thing to be waited for it is a thing to be
achieved.