The Great Gatsby

Chapter 1

Scott Fitgerald’s The Great Gatsby is told in the first person by a character who is part of the story. As is often the case with first person narrators, this raises the question of the ‘reliability’ of the narrator. A narrator who is in some way ‘unreliable’, whether through naivety, prejudice, bias or some other form of distorted viewpoint, is one whose perceptions and interpretations of people and events are not in agreement with the norms and values held by the author. However, since the author’s voice is not explicitly present (as it would be with an omniscient narrator ), how do we know what the author thinks? The answer is that the reader needs to be alert enough to read between the lines so the that he/she can deduce the position of the implied author behind the voice of the narrator. Since one often finds that what is implied is not clear-cut, it is not surprising that readers will have contrasting answers to the question of the degree of reliability of a first-person narrator. As we will see, this is the case with Nick Carraway, the first person narrator of The Great Gatsby.

Nick Carraway graduated from Yale in 1915 and later served in the First World War. He tells us that he is “inclined to reserve all judgements” and as a result people – specifically men – are inclined to confide in him. Reserving judgements is something that he attributes to advice given to him by his father. His father had told him that whenever he feels like criticising someone  (and so judging them) he should remember that not everyone has had the advantages that he has had. He went East, that is, to New York, in spring 1922 to learn the bond business. He also says that in addition to studying the bond business he also intended to read “many other books” and that he was “rather literary in college”.  In the prologue-like opening he reveals that the present moment within which he is writing is autumn and that he left the East last autumn. So the events of the story took place between spring and autumn of 1922¹.  In summary then, Nick credits himself with a non-judgemental nature that draws men into confiding in him. He also has a capacity to experience “privileged glimpses into the human heart”. Recalling Gatsby, “the man who gives his name to this book”, Nick values him for his “extraordinary gift for hope”, a “romantic² readiness” and excludes him for any responsibility for the mood of disillusionment with the “human heart” which Nick has experienced since he returned from the East. However, although he praises Gatsby for his “extraordinary gift”, he also says, paradoxically, that Gatsby represented “everything for which I have an unaffected scorn”. Nick is now living in his hometown, an unnamed Middle Western city where his family have been prominent well-to-do people for three generations. The family business is wholesale hardware.

¹ There is an apparent discrepancy here: at the beginning of Chapter IX Nick  says After two years I remember the rest of that day… which implies that the present moment of his writing is, at that point, two years after the events of the story, and so in 1924. Nicholas Tredell [Fitgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Continuum 2007)] provides a satisfying solution: Nick began to write the story in the autumn of 1923 and is finishing it in 1924.

² See later comment on Daisy’s use of ‘romantic’ and the Endnote   on the distinction between ‘romantic’ and ‘Romantic’.

On arrival in New York Nick rented a “weather-beaten cardboard bungalow” in West Egg.  West Egg is on Long Island - a peninsula 20 miles from New York  – and is one of two “unusual formations of land”, the other being East Egg. Nick’s low-status house makes a marked contrast with the expensive houses of the (shortly to be introduced) Buchanans, Daisy and Tom, of East Egg,  and Gatsby, of West Egg. We will also see that Nick’s car, “an old Dodge”, is unlike the luxury vehicles of the Buchanans and Gatsby.  If Nick’s house and car were freely chosen, then perhaps we can take it that at least one of the things he has “an unaffected scorn for” is status-conscious materialism. West Egg and East Egg are separated by a “courtesy bay”. West Egg is less fashionable than East Egg though the main distinction seems to be one of social hierarchy: East Egg is classy ‘old’ money whilst West Egg is vulgar ‘new’ money. His neighbours live in huge houses. The one to his right is a “colossal affair”. He sees it as “an imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy”. Later in the novel, we will encounter further examples of architecture and décor inspired by French examples. It would seem that the wealthy of East Coast America of the 1920’s turned to European culture to signal their ‘classy’ qualities. He soon discovers that this big house is Gatsby’s home. As Nick looks across the bay from his bungalow, he can see the “white palaces” of fashionable East Egg.

After this introductory section, the story proper begins with Nick having dinner with a distant cousin (or as Nick explains – 2nd cousin once removed) Daisy née Fay, and her husband, Tom Buchanan, whom Nick had known at Yale. Tom was a top footballer at college, and he is very rich from his family’s wealth. Their house is a cheerful red-and-white Colonial mansion with an extensive garden leading down to the shore where Tom kept his “snub-nosed motor boat”. Nick’s description of him is unsympathetic: he is said to have a “hard mouth” and a ‘supercilious manner” with “shining arrogant eyes”. Nick’ describes   what we might call the ‘living room’ as “a bright rosy-coloured space” with French windows “at either end”. These windows were ajar and “gleaming white”³. There is a  “wine-coloured rug” but the room’s whiteness is further emphasised by the “frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling”. Daisy and another young woman are sitting on an enormous couch though Nick says they are “buoyed up as though on an anchored balloon”. They are both dressed in white and Nick’s description gives them a weightless, ethereal quality: “Their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.” One can see something goddess-like in the appearance of these women. There is, later in the novel (Chapter VII. P. 92),  a parallel description of Daisy and Jordan on the same “enormous couch” in which they are said to be “like  silver idols”⁴. Nick referred earlier to the “white palaces” of East Egg and if we take the suggestion of “palaces” more literally than it would seem to have been intended, and if we connect ‘palace’ with the goddess suggestion and invoke the later reference to “idols”, then Fitzgerald, through Nick, can be seen as drawing upon the language of myth and fable.  Thus, notwithstanding the documentary details of modern America – things such as the Dodge car, the snub-nosed motor boat – there is also a suggestion of a mythic world of palaces, where men may be enchanted by goddesses and fall down in idolatrous worship. 

³ Certain colour adjectives occur many times in the novel. White is the most common [it occurs 47 times]; yellow, blue and green are also frequently used; red and pink are also relatively frequent. Overall, this emphasis on colour could be said to be symbolic of the vividness and opulence of the Gatsby world. We could also see in it an emphasis on the visual which could suggest that this world is one of surfaces and appearances. 
Both white and green call for special attention. White is associated with Daisy and in a number of important contexts it is linked with silver. As in the example cited above:  “Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses”. The significance of green will be explored in due course.

 ⁴ Page references are to the Oxford World’s Classic edition of The Great Gatsby (OUP 1998).

Returning to Nick’s description of his visit to the Buchanans, he tells us that Daisy has an absurd, charming little laugh and greets Nick with “I’m paralysed with happiness.” As she talks to Nick she gives the impression that there was no one else in the world she so much wanted to see. She speaks softly, in a murmur – so that people had to lean toward her. In a murmur she lets Nick know the surname of the other woman.  She is Miss  Baker.

Daisy begins to question him in “a low, thrilling voice… her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it…there was an excitement in her voice⁵ that men found it difficult to forget: “a singing compulsion…a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.” Here we note the language of enchantment:  “A low thrilling voice”,  a “singing compulsion”. With the novel’s mythic dimension in mind, that “singing compulsion” may bring to mind the Sirens of the “Odyssey” whose singing enchanted and compelled sailors towards them in order to lure them on to shipwrecking rocks. She tells Nick of her ‘baby’.

⁵  This is the first of the many occasions when Nick  describes the seductive power of Daisy’s voice. 

Nick describes Miss Baker as having a wan, charming, discontented face. He finds her attractive. On discovering that Nick lives in West Egg,  she mentions a man called Gatsby and says that Nick must know Gatsby. Gatsby, it seems, is someone that everybody knows, or knows of.

       During dinner, Nick describes the conversation of the women as cool as their white dresses and sees in their impersonal eyes  an  absence of all desire,  a ‘cool’, sophisticated sang-froid. Tom puts in a bit about the ideas in a book called, The Rise of the Coloured Empires. The book puts forward the theory that the white races (who equal  civilization) are under threat. Then the phone rings. The butler goes to answer it and returns with a whispered message to Tom who goes out to take the call.  Daisy leans over to Nick and says he reminds her of an “absolute rose”. Nick seems the absurdity of this since, as he says, “I am not even faintly like a rose” yet he is captivated by the quality of her voice which is “glowing and singing” and by her suggestive intimacy as she leans forward to utter, “breathless, thrilling words”. Then suddenly she leaves the table and goes into the house. Incidentally, it is worth noting that the novel contains many references to roses. Indeed, as we shall see,  the novel’s movement from romance to tragedy and death is encapsulated in the movement from roses being suggestive of romance and beauty to Gatsby’s final perception of a rose as a “grotesque thing” (p.128). 

       Miss Baker strains to overhear the murmur of voices from another room; she tells Nick that Tom has a woman in New York. Then Tom and Daisy return. Daisy says that when she was out of the room she looked outdoors and thought it was “very romantic”. She says there was a bird singing on the lawn which she thinks must have been a nightingale “come over on the Cunard or White Star Line”. Before saying this, she “glanced searchingly at Miss Baker”. The implication being that she knows that Miss Baker knows about Tom’s affairs and her ‘searching’ look probably shows that she wonders what Miss Baker might have said to Nick.  At one level, her ‘romantic’ ideas of nightingales and their unlikely Atlantic crossing in luxurious ocean liners can be seen as a way of covering up what she feels as the wronged wife whose husband’s infidelities are known to at least one other person. However, Daisy’s combination of ‘”romantic” and. nightingales can also be seen as a veiled allusion, albeit unwittingly made, to “Ode to a Nightingale”, a poem by the Romantic poet John Keats. (If you look to the contents of the Blog on this site, you will find a section which explores Keats’s Ode.) As such, Daisy unwittingly expresses a key word, or words. These ‘words’ being lower-case ‘romantic’ and upper-case ‘Romantic.’ Furthermore, Daisy’s speculation that the nightingale must have crossed the Atlantic on the Cunard or White Star line has a further significance beyond her awareness. The luxurious liner, symbol of material wealth, can be seen as transporting Romantic⁶ culture, symbolized by the nightingale, to the culturally deficient, though materially rich, United States. A similar point concerning America and European culture has already been made about the modelling of Gatsby’s house on “some Hotel de Ville in Normandy”.

⁶ See Footnote 2 on previous comment on ‘romantic’.

After dinner, Tom and Miss Baker go into the library together and Nick and Daisy go via a series of connecting verandas to a porch in front. She confides to Nick that she has had a bad time and that she is cynical and thinks that everything’s terrible now. This, she says, is what the most advanced people think. Nick feels that she is not being sincere and then she starts to smirk as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. When they go back inside, Nick says,  “the crimson room bloomed with light”. 

Miss Baker says she has to go to bed (it’s 10 pm) as she has a tournament tomorrow.  Nick then realises that she is Jordan Baker, a famous lady golfer (he has seen her face in current magazines).She is staying with the Buchanans and she will be spending lots of week-ends with them over the summer. She is from Louisville which is where Daisy came from; as Daisy puts it, their “white girlhood” was passed together there.

When Nick leaves he reflects on Tom nibbling at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his “peremptory heart”.

Nick drives home and, once there, stays out in the summer night and sees that his neighbour, Mr. Gatsby, is taking in the night as well. He watches him as he stretches out “his arms toward the dark water in a curious way” and Nick is sure that he was trembling. Looking seaward, all Nick sees is a single green light. that might have been the end of a dock.   When Nick looks back at Gatsby, he has gone. As we will discover, the green light belongs to the Buchanan dock and green is a colour that will take on a complex symbolic significance. And, with the benefit of hindsight, we can speculate that  Gatsby’s “curious” gesture may have been act of veneration, or of appeal or of inviting an embrace or all three!

This is a good point to consider further the importance of Romanticism in the novel. Romanticism is a movement in the arts in Europe which, according to most cultural histories, began in the late eighteenth century, and had its finest period in the early nineteenth century. Definitions of Romanticism are likely to include a belief in the boundlessness of the individual’s imagination and a refusal to accept limits on the individual’s aspirations and potential. The solitary individual standing apart from society and engaged in a quest became a key figure in Romanticism. Gatsby can be seen as having affinities with this archetype when Nick sees him standing alone and stretching his arms out “toward the dark water in a curious way”.

Chapter 2

Between West Egg and New York there is the ‘valley of ashes’: a desolate, industrialised area with accumulated ash-heaps. I want to make three points concerning this ‘valley’. The first is that it is important to note that Nick emphasises the all-pervading presence of dust in the valley. He says that it is a place where “spasms of bleak dust … drift endlessly over it” (21). Thus, we could say that it is ‘The valley of [dust and] ashes’. My second point concerns the use of “valley”. ‘Valley of ashes’ (my italics) at first sight may seem incongruous since ‘valley’ has ‘green’ associations rather than suggestions of industrial pollution. However, there is an older, Biblical suggestion associated with a phrase beginning ‘The valley of’. There are many examples of this phrase in the Bible such as ‘”The valley of Jehoshaphat”, “The valley of the giants”, “The valley of Rephaim’ and “The valley of the shadow of death”. This last example from Psalm 23 is particularly relevant since the valley of ashes in Gatsby, being a place of dust and ashes, is symbolically a place of death. In the Catholic church service of Ash Wednesday the priest makes a sign of the cross with ashes on the foreheads of the congregation and, to remind them of their mortality, says, “Remember you are dust and into dust you shall return”. Fitzgerald, having been brought up as a Catholic, must have been familiar with this. My third point is to identify ‘dust’ as a key word in Gatsby. We are introduced to it in the opening pages where Nick tells us that a destructive dust, a “foul dust”, had “floated in the wake” of Gatsby’s “dreams” – words that give us the Gatsby story in miniature. This use of dust is not an isolated example since the word occurs ten times in the novel.

Nick develops his description of the valley. We are told that there is a river on one side of the ‘valley’ and a railroad bridge spans the river but, when a barge passes along,  the drawbridge goes up and the train must wait. Looking over the valley is a huge advert for Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, an oculist – it takes the form of eyes looking out from a pair of “enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose”. His eyes are “gigantic”. Eckleburg’s actual practice no longer exists, but his personified presence is said (by Nick) to “brood on over the solemn dumping ground.” This sense of Eckleburg watching from his elevated position recurs in Chapter VII where we are told, “Over the ash heaps  the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil”. The nature of Eckleburg’s brooding presence will be further developed in Chapter VIII. 

Nick goes by train to New York one Sunday afternoon with Tom. The train stops before the river and Tom gets out on impulse to let Nick meet Tom’s girlfriend. He takes him to a block of buildings which consists of three shops: one for rent, one of which is an all-night restaurant and the other a garage. Tom leads him into the garage. They meet a man who is described as “blond, spiritless…anaemic… and faintly handsome”. Tom heartily addresses him as Wilson. They talk of a car Tom has said he will sell to Wilson – Tom has promised it but hasn’t brought it yet. 

A woman comes downstairs. Nick says she is “in her middle thirties, and faintly stout but carried her flesh sensuously”. “Her face contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her”. She approaches Tom (“walking through her husband as if he were a ghost”), and orders her husband in “a soft, coarse voice” to get some chairs. She is wearing a spotted dress of blue crepe-de-chine. With Wilson out of earshot, Tom tells her to get the next train into New York. Nick and Tom leave and wait for Mrs Wilson (Myrtle) at the station’s news-stand. They all get on the next train though they sit in separate compartments (in case any East Eggers should spot Tom with ‘another woman’). She has changed into brown figured muslin dress. Once in New York, they join up and take a taxi to an apartment block – “a long white cake” of apartment-houses. On the way, Mrs. Wilson, buys a puppy.

 The small apartment  is on the top-floor . It has two living rooms, one bedroom and a  bathroom. It is not, according to Nick, tastefully furnished.  He says the living room was “crowded to the doors with tapestried furniture entirely too large” for the room. The tapestries show “scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles” – note the further reference to an aspect of French culture.  They drink whisky. Nick says that he was drunk for the second time in his life that afternoon. He goes out to get cigarettes. When he returns, Tom and Myrtle come out of the bedroom. After that,  guests start to arrive including Catherine, Myrtle’s sister, and a Mr. McKee (a photographer) and Mrs. McKee (“shrill, languid, handsome and horrible”) from the flats below. Mr. McKee is described as a “pale, feminine man”. Myrtle has changed into an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-coloured chiffon, which gives her an air of hauteur. Mrs .McKee compliments her on her dress and suggests that “Chester” (Mr. McKee) could photograph her. This leads to Mr. McKee referring to photographs he has taken “out on Long Island”. He refers to two in particular, ‘Montauk point - the Gulls’ and ‘Montauk Point - the Sea’. The prosaic, unimaginative titles suggest that the photographs have a similar quality.

Catherine sits next to Nick and when he says he is living at West Egg she says she went to a party at Gatsby’s about a month ago. She mentions a rumour that he is a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm. She also tells Nick that Tom and Myrtle can’t stand their spouses but Tom can’t divorce because his wife is a Catholic (this is not true – it’s probably a lie told by Tom). The talk goes on: Myrtle says she was a fool to marry Wilson. He got married in a borrowed suit and when Myrtle found out she cried “to beat the band” all afternoon. They continue to drink. Catherine doesn’t drink – she feels as good on nothing at all. Sandwiches are sent for. 

Nick thinks of a passer-by in the street looking up at their lit windows and “wondering”. Nick puts himself in that man’s shoes and feels that he too is “within and without”, and is “simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the “inexhaustible variety of life”. This ambiguity of response seems characteristic of Nick. He is both involved in the events he narrates and he is also their observer, and so “within and without”.

Myrtle confides in Nick how she first met Tom whilst she was on the train to New York. This first meeting led to them getting into a taxi together. The room fills with Myrtle’s “artificial laughter”. The evening wears on. Mr. McKee falls asleep. The little dog is groaning faintly. Around midnight, Tom and Myrtle are raising voices on the subject of whether Myrtle has the right to say Daisy’s name. She shouts it out. Tom hits her and breaks her nose. McKee and Nick leave as the women tend to Myrtle.

The narrative then does a cinematic jump cut to Nick and McKee in the lift together. McKee invites Nick to lunch and Nick agrees though nothing definite is arranged. Then there is a jump to Nick standing beside Mr. McKee (“a pale, feminine man”) who is on his bed and sitting up in his underwear and showing Nick a portfolio of his photographs. The narrative then jumps to Nick lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania station waiting for the four o’clock train. Are we to take it that there has been a sexual encounter between the men? Mr. McKee in his underwear on the bed seems to imply that there has been. As it is McKee who is in his underwear, perhaps he made sexual advances to Nick. Some readers find that the scene in the lift contains sexual innuendos.  The elevator boy tells Mr. McKee to keep his “hands off the lever” and the “lever” can be seen as phallic. The movement of the elevator is such that it ”groaned down” and “groaned” can be seen as having sexual connotations. Nick was, on his own admission, drunk for the second time in his life that afternoon (and, one assumes, evening) and, as he says, “everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it”.  This haziness is enacted by the fragmentary nature of the narrative as it jump cuts from elevator to bedroom to station platform. The whole episode of the impromptu party in the tastelessly decorated and over-furnished downtown apartment rented by Tom for sex with his mistress, has a sleazy quality to it.  Nick’s dimly-recollected casual sexual encounter (if that is what it was) with McKee seems to be a part of the sleazy atmosphere. How far it reveals a suppressed homosexuality in Nick  is a debatable point. He does, however, refer to some of his girl-friends and he is attracted to Jordan Baker, though Nick does say that she has a boyish look.

Chapter 3

The chapter begins with Nick’s vivid account of the summer season of Gatsby’s weekend parties. Every fortnight there is a party with caterers, marquees, coloured lights and an orchestra. Men and girls are said to come and go like moths among “the whisperings and the champagne and the stars”. In the afternoons there are activities on the water; Gatsby’s Rolls and his station wagon transport people to and fro. Nick describes a particular party with its food and its well-stocked bar. The large orchestra plays “yellow cocktail music” (note the synaesthesia of yellow music). Nick is both excited by the party’s colour and glamour and, at the same time, he is aware of the social superficiality of it. Of the guests he says that “introductions are forgotten on the spot” and “wanderers, confident girls … glide on through the sea-change of faces”. Suddenly “one of these gypsies in trembling opal seizes a cocktail, dumps it down and, moving her hands like Frisco (Joe Frisco, a dancer), dances out alone on the …platform…the news goes around… she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.”

That descriptive trio, “the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” is striking. A more commonplace party atmosphere could have been conveyed by “the music and the champagne and the lights”. By putting the champagne, a relatively common party ingredient, between the poetically suggestive terms, “whisperings” and “stars”, Nick elevates the party into something more romantic and enchanting. This romantic stylistic effect is a feature of Nick’s style. The following ‘romantic’ words are used by Nick at various points in the novel: deathless (1), enchanted (5), exhilarating, (1), beauty (7), magic (2), mystery (3), wild (11) and wonder (8). After each word I have bracketed the number of times it occurs and I would argue that even those with a single instance make a significant impact by virtue of being a part of a consistent stylistic effect.

The first night Nick goes to a party he thinks he is the only one invited: people were not invited – they just went there. At first, he knows nobody and can’t see Gatsby but then sees Jordan Baker and joins her. They join some others. Rumours about Gatsby are aired: he killed a man; he was a German spy during the war; he was in the US army. They join Jordan’s party (ie., the social group she is in which includes her ‘escort’). Jordan is not interested in her party and, taking Nick, she leaves this group and takes him in search of Gatsby.

In their search they go into the library where a man with owl-eyed spectacles is looking at the books. He is drunk. They leave the library and the night goes on. Nick finds himself talking to a man who says he recalls him from the Army in France. This turns out to be Gatsby. Nick praises his smile: one of those rare smiles with a “quality of eternal reassurance” in it. Yet in an instant the smile disappears and Nick says he found himself “looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd”. A butler comes over with a message for Mr. Gatsby. He says that Chicago is calling him “on the wire”. Gatsby excuses himself and goes. Nick asks Jordan about Gatsby. She says he once told her that he was an Oxford man. But she doesn’t believe this. Gatsby’s butler comes and says Gatsby wants to speak to Jordan – she is surprised but goes.

Nick goes into a room full of people where there is a girl singing sadly. She is said to have had a fight with a man who says he is her husband. Nick looks around and sees that most of the women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands.

As Nick prepares to leave – he is waiting for his hat in the hall – Gatsby and Jordan come out of the library. She whispers that she has heard something amazing and that Nick should contact her by phone. She leaves. Nick lingers and has a word with Gatsby who invites him to join him in the hydroplane tomorrow morning; the butler comes and says Philadelphia is on the phone. As Nick leaves, he sees a coupe in a ditch minus a wheel. The (assumed) driver is the man who was in the library, Owl Eyes. Then the real driver comes out of the car, drunk. Other cars are unable to get out.

Nick goes home and looks back. A wafer of a moon is shining over Gatsby’s house. A sudden emptiness seems to flow now from the windows and the great doors, “endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host”, who is standing on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell. Gatsby as lone figure with hand raised in a gesture echoes the earlier romantic image of Gatsby stretching his arms out “toward the dark water”.

Nick gives quick summary of his work and leisure over the summer: his work at the Probity Trust; his short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City; dinners at the Yale Club and the Club’s library where he studied investments and securities. He began to like New York: “the racy, adventurous feel of it at night”; “the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye”. He liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women and, “in his mind”, he imagines entering their lives. At other times, “In the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered…wasting the most poignant moments of night and life”.

He loses touch with Jordan Baker and then takes up with her again. He recalls a newspaper story about Jordan. She was said to have cheated in a golfing tournament. Nick thinks that dishonesty is hard-wired into her character. It is something he supposes began in childhood as a strategy to avoid being at a disadvantage. He seems to accept it. She says she likes Nick because he is not careless. He can’t get totally involved with her as he still has a link with a girl back home which he is trying to break off. He says he is slow-thinking and full of interior rules that put a break on his desires. He says he is one of the few honest people that he knows.

Chapter 4

Nick goes through a list of the people who went to Gatsby’s house that summer. He gives a selection of the top socialites and well-connected people and the disreputable ones including “a bum named Etty”. There was a man named Klipspringer who was there so often “that he became known as ‘the boarder’ ’’.

Late in July, Gatsby calls for Nick to take him to work in New York. This is the first time Gatsby had called on him. He had been to two of Gatsby’s parties, had “mounted on his hydroplane” and had, on Gatsby’s insistence, frequently used Gatsby’s beach. Nick had spoken with Gatsby about six times and had found him to be someone with little to say. As they drive into New York, Gatsby tells Nick that he is going to have lunch with him and then asks Nick what he thinks of him. He tells Nick about himself. He says he is the son of a wealthy family from the Middle West and, in accordance with family tradition, he was educated at Oxford. Nick finds the way he says “educated at Oxford” altogether unconvincing and, as a result, “his whole statement fell to pieces”. Nick adds that he wondered “if there wasn’t something sinister about him”. When Nick asks him from what part of the Middle West he replies “San Francisco’. Taken in isolation it seems strange that Nick passes no comment on this but, in the context of the apparent lie about Oxford and Nick’s uneasiness in the presence of something sinister, it is perhaps not surprising that he does not challenge him on his ignorance of basic American geography . Gatsby’s version of his life continues with him inheriting all when his wealthy parents died. He says he “lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe…collecting jewels, hunting big game, painting… trying to forget something very sad that happened to me long ago ”. He fought in the Great War and after some heroic action in France he was decorated by every allied nation including Montenegro. He proves this by showing the medal from Montenegro and a photo of himself in an Oxford quod. Nick, who, as we have seen, was very sceptical, took these two pieces of ‘evidence’ as proof (“Then it was all true”) of all that Gatsby said. Gatsby says he knows Nick is to have tea with Jordan Baker this afternoon and she is going to make a request to Nick on Gatsby’s behalf. This suggests that Gatsby believes that if the request comes from Jordan Baker rather than himself it has a greater chance of succeeding.

They drive on into New York through the valley of ashes where Nick spots Mrs. Wilson. A motorcycle cop overtakes them and stops them. Gatsby waves a white card and the cop acknowledges Gatsby and says “Excuse me!” The white card was a Christmas Card from the commissioner of police – Gatsby did him a favour once. They cross Queensboro bridge and Nick describes the city as white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of what he calls “non-olfactory money”. According to Nick, the city seen from the Queensboro bridge is always “the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world”. The romantic language of this is in keeping with the point already made about Nick’s use of romantic words. Most of them are in response to Gatsby, to his ideas and his love for Daisy, but this one is in response to a city that is an embodiment of the wealth and materialism of America. Nick’s imagination seems to transform it into an enchanted fantasy city. Some elements of his description will be echoed in the novel’s closing lines which describe the way America’s east coast was first seen by the Dutch sailors in the seventeenth century. Nick imagines that they saw “the fresh green breast of the new world” and that they were “compelled into aesthetic comtemplation” as they faced, “for the last time in history”, something “commensurate” with their “capacity for wonder”. Nick’s description of the city makes him into a modern equivalent of a Dutch sailor seeing “for the first time” something which in its “wild promise”, its supreme “mystery” and “beauty”, stimulates his “capacity for wonder”. Yet what the Dutch sailors saw was pristine and unsullied, a “fresh green breast of the new world”, whilst Nick is seeing one of the world’s greatest monuments to money. One could simply say that his capacity to romanticise has deluded him. However, in the sentence preceding the perception of “wild promise” he writes of the city rising up “In white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money”. This sounds a different note to the romanticism of “wild promise” and “mystery and beauty”. This suggests a critical view of the city whose promise of sweetness and light is a façade whose superficiality and illusory nature is suggested by “white heaps” and “sugar lumps”. Its business is the accumulation of money that disguises the actual smell of the sweated labour that has, in the “valley of ashes” and other industrialised areas, created the money. So Nick can be a paradoxical mix of critical realism and romanticism. One wonders if his inclination to a kind of visionary romanticism wins out over his realist vein and does this make him an unreliable narrator? Or does his “capacity for wonder” help him to see things more deeply and truly?

As they cross Blackwell’s Island a limousine driven by a white chauffeur has “three modish negroes” in it – “two bucks” and a girl. Nick laughed aloud as “the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry” – Gatsby having a classy car. This makes Nick think that anything can happen in New York. Nick sees an extraordinary incongruity in black Americans being fashionable and affluent and being driven by a white chauffeur. Finding this so unusual could, of itself, be a way of registering the gross inequalities between Afro-Americans and white Americans in 1922. However, Nick’s description has racist elements. By referring to the men as “bucks”, Nick dehumanizes them by seeing them as virile animals; an impression that is further conveyed by the belittling way they are ridiculed by the use of the yolk metaphor for the whites of their eyes and the supposedly rather comical lack of civilized control suggested by “rolled”. Elsewhere in his narrative Nick shows that he can also be a snob. This can be seen in the way he refers to his home help. She is not named and is simply referred to as “my Finn” as if he owned her. When he calls on her to ask her to do extra duties, he finds her home “among soggy whitewashed alleys”. “Soggy” is disdainful and conveys a lack of sympathy for the poor.

At this point the narrative cuts from the journey into the city to lunch time and to the appointment that we assume was made with Gatsby. It is “Roaring noon”. In a well-fanned 42nd St. cellar, Nick meets Gatsby for lunch. There he is introduced to a Mr. Wolfshiem. Nick describes him as follows: “A small flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril”. He also also has “tiny eyes”. To racism and snobbery we could now add anti-Semitism to Nick’s prejudices. Having been introduced to a man with a Jewish name, Nick’s immediate reaction is to bring to the fore his Jewish identity and to single out his lack of a stereotypical nose since it is “flat”. Taken with “small” and the details of the nasal hair and the “tiny” eyes, this is all said with disdain. Wolfshiem is an unsavoury character; however, Nick’s description turns the fact of being Jewish and his physical features (notwithstanding the atypical nose), rather than his character or behaviour, into what makes him unsavoury. What, then, are we to make of this racist, anti-Semitic snob? We have, at least, to say that Nick has his flaws. Perhaps this is Fitzgerald’s way of making him typically human since we are all flawed to some degree. And perhaps Fitzgerald’s inclusion of Nick’s flaws is a way of pointing to some typical prejudices which were ‘wired into’ many Yale educated, white middle-class Americans in the 1920s – perhaps into Fitzgerald himself! Whether these attitudes undermine our faith in Nick as narrator, is a debatable point.

They go into the restaurant and Wolfshiem reminisces about the night at the Metropole when Rosy Rosenthal was shot. It is clear that Wolfsheim is a gangster. Nick shows some knowledge of the Rosenthal murder and of those who were executed for it. Wolfsheim then says to Nick, “I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion?” Gatsby quickly says that this isn’t the man. Gatsby has to go to make a phone call and Wolfsheim speaks admiringly of him and says he is an “Oggsford man”. He says he first got to know Gatsby after the war. He then points out his cuff buttons [links?] and they are human molars! He then says, out of nothing, that Gatsby is very careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend’s wife – which seems to be true since the other man whose wife he does more than look out is far from being a friend. Gatsby comes back and he and Nick discuss their morning conversation in the car. Nick is puzzled over why Gatsby wants Jordan Baker to put a question to Nick on his behalf. He assures Nick that there is nothing underhand about it since “Miss Baker’s a great sportswoman … and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all right”. Given that this is not true since she cheated in a tournament, and assuming that Gatsby is not being sarcastic, this seems to show a degree of naivety in Gatsby, a willingness to have faith in people. Which is somewhat paradoxical given that his business, as becomes increasingly evident, is a matter of criminal dishonesty. Wolfsheim says he must go and leave the young men to talk of “your sports and your young ladies”. When he leaves, Gatsby tells Nick that Wolfsheim is a gambler and that he fixed the World Series in 1919. Strangely enough, Gatsby seems to feel no embarrassment in revealing to Nick his close ‘business’ affiliations with a man who is obviously a gangster.

As they are leaving, Nick catches sight of Tom Buchanan. Tom sees Nick and comes up to him. Nick introduces Gatsby to Mr. Buchanan just after Tom had said to Nick, “Where’ve you been…Daisy’s furious because you haven’t called.” At the mention of Daisy, Nick sees a strained look on Gatsby’s face and, when he turns around, he finds that Gatsby has gone.

The narrative jumps to Nick’s tea date with Jordan Baker in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel. She is recalling the events of one October day in 1917 in Louisville when she was 16. Nick gives an account of what she said. As she recalls that time she mentions that there were red, white and blue banners (pro-England?) in front of all the houses. Daisy Fay was 18 and the most popular of all the young girls. She dressed in white and had a white roadster; officers from Camp Taylor were always ringing her. On the day recalled, Jordan was passing Daisy’s when she saw Daisy in the roadster with a young officer. Daisy called her over and she felt that there was a strong romantic connection between Daisy and the officer who was Jay Gatsby. In winter 1917 there was a rumour that Daisy wanted to go to New York to say goodbye to an officer going overseas; her parents forbade her. But in autumn 1918 she was a happy socialite once again. In June 1919 she married Tom Buchanan. It was a big wedding and Jordan was a bridesmaid. The night before the wedding, Jordan found Daisy drunk and saying that she wanted to call off the wedding. She had a letter in her hand, but it was destroyed during the sobering up process carried out by Jordan and a maid. Next day she married Tom. For their honeymoon they spent three months in the South Seas. Having returned, Jordan met them in Santa Barbara and she thought Daisy was very much in love with Tom. However, Tom had a driving accident and a girl passenger (a chambermaid) was injured – it was in the papers.

In April 1920 Daisy had her baby. They went to France for a year. Jordan saw them one spring in Cannes (1921?). Then they returned to USA, to Chicago. Their social circle was a “fast crowd”, but Daisy’s reputation was untarnished: she didn’t drink; there were no affairs. However, Nick, puts it in this way, “Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all – and yet there was something in that voice of hers.”

About six weeks ago, Daisy heard the name of Gatsby and asked Jordan about him; she said he must be the Gatsby she used to know. It was at that point that Jordan made the link between the man in the roadster in 1917 and the Jay Gatsby of West Egg.

Nick explains that when Jordan finished the story they were in Central Park. They are being driven in a Victoria (a horse-drawn carriage) and Jordan told him that Jay Gatsby bought the house because it was opposite (across the bay) to Daisy’s house. Jordan says that Gatsby wants Nick to invite Daisy over to his house and then Gatsby will call. He had asked Jordan to do this at the party that night when he had a private word with her. Nick wonders why Gatsby did not ask Jordan to act as go-between. She says it is because Nick’s bungalow is next door to Gatsby’s house. With Daisy at Nick’s, Gatsby can turn up and then take the opportunity to show her the grandeur of his own home and his wealth.

It is now dark and Nick puts his arm around Jordan. Jordan adds a further detail to Nick’s invitation to Daisy: she is not to be told that Gatsby will turn up. He draws Jordan closer to him. He describes her as a “clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal scepticism…with a wan, scornful mouth”. Jordan murmurs, “Daisy ought to have something in her life”.

Chapter 5

Two am Nick is returning home after seeing Jordan. He finds everything lit up in Gatsby’s. Gatsby comes to see him; he wants to talk. Nick tells him he has agreed to ring Daisy tomorrow and invite her to tea. Gatsby, presumably as a reward, offers Nick some ‘work’; he says he could make a nice bit of money. Nick turns him down.

Next day, Nick calls Daisy and invites her to tea tomorrow.  He tells her not to bring Tom. To which she says, “Who is Tom?”. Here we should consider what Nick is doing. He knows that Daisy and Gatsby were romantically involved with each other. He knows that Gatsby is in love with her and has gone to extraordinary lengths to manoeuvre himself into a chance to meet her. Nick’s ‘do not bring Tom’ could mislead Daisy into thinking that he is trying to start an affair with Daisy. Her half jocular, mildly flirtatious question suggests that she is willing to at least play along with this possibility. Of course, the whole arrangement is even more misleading since Nick has not revealed Gatsby’s role. So Nick is deceiving Daisy and is playing a part in beginning a potentially adulterous affair between Daisy and Gatsby. Nick’s assertion of his honesty (“I am one of the few honest people I have ever known”), does seem to be at odds with his role as a morally suspect go-between. He does, however, know that Tom has been unfaithful to Daisy and he may have been persuaded by Jordan’s, “Daisy ought to have something in her life” and by his desire to please Jordan. However, he does not seem to have  reasoned through possible  justifications (‘Tom’s unfaithfulness’, ‘Daisy’s needs’) for enabling a potential affair. That morning on the drive into New York,  Gatsby had referred to  a “big request” that Jordan would make on Gatsby’s behalf and Nick had imagined it would be “something utterly fantastic”. When Jordan told him what Gatsby wanted him to do – to invite Daisy over for tea so that Gatsby could meet her – he is surprised and refers to it as “such a little thing”. On the face of it, then, Nick does not see himself as acting as a ‘pander’ to an extra-marital affair. Or, he is being disingenuous, and therefore not as honest as he claims, when he refers to the meeting as a “little thing”. 

Somebody who acts as a go-between in secretive and usually illicit love affairs is called a pander. The word has its origin in a character called Pandarus who, in ancient Troy, according to a medieval Italian version of the Troy story, acted as a go-between for the lovers Troilus and Cressida. The story was further developed bhaucer and Shakespeare. Nick himself uses the word in its verbal sense in his closing paragraphs when he personifies some trees and says that they “pandered in whispers”.  Pander used as a verb. To pander, means to help somebody to indulge their desires. It can be used with a pejorative sense when the desire involved is that of lust, but it seems to have developed a gentler sense in which the desires gratified are of a milder nature. 

The next day, the day Daisy has agreed to come for tea, Gatsby sends a man over to cut Nick’s lawn – even though it is raining. Nick remembers that he had forgotten to tell “his Finn”, his home help, to come back to help with the tea so he drives into West Egg to buy some cups and lemons and flowers and to search for his home help among the “soggy, whitewashed alleys” of what seems to be an impoverished area.

At 2:00 pm Gatsby sends an abundance of flowers and at 3:00 pm Gatsby arrives. At 4:00 pm Daisy arrives wearing a three-cornered lavender hat. She has a bright, ecstatic smile. She says to Nick, “low in his ear”, “Are you in love with me … or why did I have to come alone?”. Nick feels that “the exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain”. She sends the chauffeur away. They go into the house but Gatsby is not there. Then he knocks on the front door. Nick lets him in and Gatsby goes past Nick and into the living room to meet Daisy. Nick does not join them. He listens by the door and when he hears Daisy’s voice “on a clear artificial note” say “I certainly am awfully glad to see you again” he knows that Daisy seems to have taken the situation in her stride. Nick joins them, Gatsby explains to Nick that they have met before; Daisy says that they haven’t met “for years” and Gatsby adds the more exact, “Five years next November”. The “demoniac Finn” serves tea. Nick leaves them alone. Half an hour later, he goes back and finds Daisy has tears on her face. Gatsby is glowing. When Daisy speaks, Nick says, “Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.”

Gatsby wants to show them round his house. He says it took him three years to earn the money to buy the house. Nick asks him what business he is in. Gatsby is evasive but then he says the drug-store business and oil – but he then says he is no longer in these businesses. He shows them round: the Marie Antoinette music rooms, the Restoration salons, the Merton College library (note again the references to European culture).  In one bedroom there is the “boarder” (we would probably say, ‘lodger’), Mr Klipspringer, in his pyjamas doing “liver exercises”. Finally, they go into Gatsby’s own apartment where he  shows Daisy his clothes. Daisy sobs into the shirts: “I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts”.

Nick notes that Gatsby has been through three phases in this meeting with Daisy: embarrassment, unreasoning joy and wonder at her presence.

They are to be shown around the grounds but it begins to rain again. Looking through the window which overlooks the Sound, he points to Daisy’s house and identifies the green light that burns all night at the end of her dock.  The green light was first mentioned at the end of Chapter I when Nick observed Gatsby at night on his lawn apparently looking at the stars. Nick says that Gatsby stretched out his arms toward the dark water in “a curious way”. Then looking seaward, Nick sees only a single, green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. In Chapter 4 after Jordan has been telling Nick about Daisy’s past she adds that Gatsby bought the house so that Daisy would be just across the bay. And at that point Nick grasps the significance of Gatsby’s contemplation of the green light.  It represents Daisy. But Nick now feels that for Gatsby the green light has lost its colossal significance.  After five⁷ years of longing for Daisy, Gatsby now has her beside him and so what need is there for him to stretch out his arms across the dark waters towards the symbolic representation of Daisy. In so far as Daisy fulfils all that the green light signifies, to attain her is to lose the light’s “supernal lustre”⁸, its enchanted gleam. It has joined the ranks of the ordinary; it is just another light on a dock. In the same way, Daisy attained can not match the ‘enchanting beauty’ of an idealized   Daisy who has been so ‘ardently’ desired and longed for over the years.

⁷ He first met her in 1917 and lost her to Tom in 1919.

⁸  Tony Tanner’s  phrase: see Tanner’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Gatsby.

Looking around Gatsby’s apartment, Nick notices a photograph of an elderly man in yachting costume. Gatsby explains that this is Dan Cody who was a close friend. There is also a photograph of Gatsby in yachting gear. He appears to be about eighteen. At this point, they are interrupted by a phone call for Mr Gatsby (there are a lot of interrupting phone calls in Gatsby). The call seems to be ‘business’. On his return, Gatsby finds Klipspringer and gets him to play the piano. He plays a popular Jazz Age song. Nick prepares to leave. As he does so, he fancies that he sees some doubt in Gatsby’s face as to the quality of his present happiness. He feels that after five years of dreaming about her , Gatsby had given her a significance beyond that which she can carry and fulfil. Nick reasons that Gatsby’s dreams, have gone beyond her, beyond everything. But these thoughts are corrected when he looks again and sees them hand in hand. When Daisy said something low in his ear he turned to her with a rush of emotion. Nick thinks that her voice “held him most”. He says that “its fluctuating feverish warmth… couldn’t be over-dreamed, – that voice was a deathless song”.  So, as Nick leaves, he looks back on them as a couple “possessed by intense life”. 

Chapter 6

When he was driving Nick to New York, Gatsby told Nick one version of his early life (see Chapter 4). According to that version (and Nick gives his exact words), he was “the son of wealthy people in the Middle West” (like Nick!) and, following family tradition, he was educated at Oxford (“all my ancestors have been educated there for many years”). At the beginning of Chapter VI, after Nick summarises the ways in which Gatsby’s notoriety increased all summer, Nick relates the truthful version of Gatsby’s early life – the version that Gatsby told him “very much later” (though, given the novel’s short time span, it is difficult to find room for this “very much later”).

He was born James Gatz. His parents were “unsuccessful farm people” and James Gatz had “never really accepted them as his parents”. “Unsuccessful farm people” makes them quite unlike the wealthy parents of Gatsby’s first version of himself. However, Gatsby’s need to invent distinguished parents is true to Gatsby’s psychology. Sigmund Freud had a term for this psychological phenomenon. He called it ‘Family Romance”. The essence of this mental state is that a young child or adolescent fantasises that they are the child of parents of higher social status than their actual parents. Nick uses a Greek philosophical idea to express Gatsby’s ‘family romance” when he says, “Jay Gatsby … sprang from his Platonic conception of himself”. The Greek philosopher Plato (428 BC – 347) thought that all things in the material world were imitations (and so imperfect) of a timeless, absolute dimension of perfect ideas or ‘forms’. A Platonic conception is an idea that you believe to be truly real, whilst what is widely taken to be reality, in this case, his actual parents, is merely an imitation of reality. (Plato’s philosophy is complex and a Google search will lead you into deeper waters. However, as part of an A-level Literature student’s ‘wider reading’ – you could look up Plato’s Allegory of the Cave). Having used Plato, Nick immediately adds some Christian theology when he says that Gatsby was “a son of God…” who “must be about his Father’s business” – according to Christian belief, Christ is the son of God and in St Luke’s Gospel Christ said that he “must be about His Father’s business”. This seems to be Nick elevating and ennobling Gatsby with a Plato connection and a Christ-like identity (even making God his father!). However, we need to bear in mind that Nick undermines these elevated terms when he defines that “business” as “the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty”. This, one assumes, is the flashy materialism that Nick, in Chapter One, tells us that he has an “unaffected scorn” for. The young Gatz is said to be constantly fantasising about a “universe of ineffable gaudiness”, that is a world that is indescribably bright and colourful in a flashy, tasteless way. “Gaudiness” is Nick’s critical version of what Gatz probably thought of as a palatial world of deluxe goods that would prove that he had achieved high social status. Nick then adds that these fantasies were, in Gatz’s imagination, a “satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality; a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing”. I have already given as characteristics of Romanticism, “the boundlessness of the individual’s imagination” and “a refusal to set limits on an individual’s potential”. By virtue of having a Platonic conception of himself and a quasi-divine identity, Gatsby exhibits these characteristics. So, notwithstanding the critique suggested by terms like “vulgar” and “gaudiness”, Nick also gives Gatsby an heroic Romantic identity. ‘Heroic’ because he is not to be defined by socially given roles as the son of “unsuccessful farm people’ or as James Gatz the young drifter picking up casual, seasonal work.

Overall, what is striking is the ambiguity of Nick’s response to Gatsby. On the one hand, with his Platonic and Christological references he elevates him, whilst on the other, he uses severely critical terms : “vulgar” and “meretricious” and “gaudiness”.

Turning from what we might call the psychological or even spiritual aspect of the biography, Nick provides more of the actual facts of Gatsby’s life. He tells us that at 17 James Gatz became Jay Gatsby. He was a beach loafer along Lake Superior when he saw and rowed out to the yacht of a multi-millionaire, Dan Coady, to tell him that he needed to take action in the face of a coming wind. He gained Cody’s confidence and was taken up by him and became an important member of his crew. Cody was 50 when Gatsby met him. He had made money in the Yukon and in Montana copper. In 1902 he had married Ella Kaye “the newspaper woman”. She had exploited him for his money and had “sent him to sea in a yacht”. Gatsby was taken on as crew for these sea-going voyages, an arrangement that lasted for five years. This might have lasted indefinitely had it not been for the fact that Ella Kaye had “come on board one night in Boston” and that “a week later Dan Cody had inhospitably died”. Ella’s role in his death is left to our imagination. Gatsby inherited a $25, 000 legacy but he never saw it: Ella , by means of a “legal device”, got everything.

Nick doesn’t see Gatsby for several weeks, then one Sunday afternoon he goes to his house Then a party of three arrive on horseback including Tom Buchanan. Tom was with a Mr. Sloane and a ”pretty lady in a brown riding habit”. Gatsby says he has met Tom once before and says he knows his wife. The lady says she would like to come to Gatsby’s next party. He agrees. He invites them to stay for supper. The lady says that Gatsby and Nick should come to supper at her house. Sloane’s manner shows that he does not want Gatsby to come – but Gatsby, with a characteristic lack of worldly sophistication, does not pick up the signals. Gatsby gets ready to go, but the threesome, on Sloane’s insistence, leave promptly and have gone just as Gatsby comes out of his front door.

The following Saturday night, Tom goes with Daisy to Gatsby’s party. There is the same profusion of champagne, the same many-coloured, many-keyed commotion. The Buchanans arrived at twilight and they and Nick and Gatsby stroll out among “the sparkling hundreds”. Gatsby introduces them to his celebrity guests. Daisy and Gatsby dance. When they all stop for supper, Daisy, Nick and Tom, joining a larger group at their table, sit down together – Gatsby having been called away. Tom wants to join another group – he says there is an amusing person at that group. Daisy gives him the go ahead but adds, “if you want to take down any addresses here’s my little gold pencil”. A moment after Tom leaves, Daisy looks around and then tells Nick that the girl was “common but pretty”. So she realizes that the “pretty girl” was Tom’s real reason for joining that other group. Their own table turns out to be a “particularly tipsy table”. Daisy doesn’t like this and doesn’t like West Egg – she is “appalled” by it. It has no ‘class’, no traditions. It is a raw intrusion into the landscape: “an unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village”,

As they are leaving, Tom makes a contemptuous reference to Gatsby as a newly rich bootlegger. Nick defends him as does Daisy. Daisy says Gatsby got rich through owning drug stores. Notwithstanding Daisy’s dislike of West Egg, she lingers as she hears a “sad little waltz of that year”. Nick interprets her mood as follows: “in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world.”

Nick stays late and then talks to Gatsby. Gatsby wants Daisy to divorce Tom and marry Gatsby in Louisville just as if it were five years ago. He wants to reconnect with the person he was five years ago on an autumn night when he kissed Daisy. Here we should read again the final pages of Chapter VI and remind ourselves of what we are told Gatsby said about that autumn night. Nick says that he finds “appalling sentimentality” in at least some of what Gatsby says. Yet how much of Nick’s account represents the actual words of Gatsby? A “sidewalk white with moonlight” and “mysterious excitement” could be the language of sentimental romances and so available to Gatsby. Similarly, “At her lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower”, but much of the rest seems well beyond Gatsby’s powers of expression. Here I am thinking of the use of “bustle” in “stir and bustle among the stars”; the idea of sidewalks forming a “ladder” (with its echo of Jacob’s Biblical ladder) leading to a “secret place above the trees”; the fanciful idea of sucking on “the pap of life” and gulping down “the incomparable milk of wonder”; The use of the adjectives in “unutterable visions” and “perishable breath”; the boldly incongruous “romp” in the context of God. This is Nick in poetic mode. It raises the question of how far the account is true to Gatsby’s felt experience. This is a recurring question in The Great Gatsby . At various points we wonder, is this Gatsby with Nick perfectly articulating Gatsby’s feelings, or is this Nick using the persona of Gatsby to articulate his own Romantic feelings? Perhaps we should see it as a case of ‘both/and’. As the chapter closes, Nick rather admits that Gatsby is prompting and awakening certain feelings in Nick. He says that Gatsby’s story reminded him of something –“an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I heard somewhere a long time ago”. However, he could not bring those lost words to mind and so what was “almost remembered was uncommunicable forever”. This response suggests that Gatsby has been unwittingly acting as the means of awakening some deeper and, as it turns out, inaccessible part of Nick. This may go a long way to explain the particular importance of Gatsby for Nick. Theirs can be seen as a complex symbiotic relationship. Gatsby awakens Nick’s inner life in ways beyond the powers of the humdrum life of the hardware business in the Mid West and the superficial excitements of working in the bond business in New York. Nick can then serve Gatsby by articulating in rhythm and words Gatsby’s experience. He tells us that he was “rather literary in college”. Incidentally, the combination of “elusive rhythm” and “fragment of lost words” that Nick tries to recall suggests poetry, Perhaps some lines by John Keats, the Romantic poet previously referred to. We know that Keats was Scott Fitzgerald’s favourite English poet.

Chapter 7

One Saturday night the lights in Gatsby’s didn’t go on. “My Finn” tells Nick that all Gatsby’s servants were dismissed a week ago and replaced with six others. A grocery boy said that the kitchen was now a mess and there was a rumour that the servants weren’t really proper domestic staff. Nick reflects that Gatsby’s career as Trimalchio was over. Trimalchio is a character in a 1st century AD Latin work of fiction by Petronius called Satyricon. Trimalchio was a slave who ‘acquired’ great wealth and gave lavish parties. Fitzgerald originally gave the title Trimalchio to the work that became The Great Gatsby.

Next day, Gatsby calls Nick. Nick speaks to Gatsby about the changes. Gatsby explains that he dismissed the servants because Daisy now calls every afternoon and Gatsby didn’t want any gossip. The new ‘servants’ were Wolfsheim’s ‘people’. Gatsby says that Daisy has invited himself and Nick to come to lunch tomorrow.

The following day is the hottest of the summer. Nick and Gatsby arrive together. Daisy and Jordan are on a couch dressed in white (see Nick’s original meeting with them in Chapter I). Tom is on the phone refusing to sell a car. Tom enters, greets them and goes for drinks. Daisy kisses Gatsby on the mouth. We are to assume that when Gatsby says that Daisy is “calling every afternoon” that they have become lovers. This is not the first time, for as Nick will tell us in Chapter VIII that they had had intercourse in 1917: “…he took Daisy one still October night…” (p. 118).

Daisy’s daughter is brought in by a nurse. Daisy is gushing over the child: “‘Blessed precious’” she “crooned”. The child’s name is Pammy. They have luncheon. Daisy suggests a trip into town. She speaks lovingly to Gatsby and “Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space”. Tom notices, takes it as amounting to a declaration of love and is, as Nick puts it, “astounded”. Tom picks up Daisy’s earlier suggestion and insists that they go into town. The girls get ready and Tom gets a bottle of whisky to take. Whilst Tom is out of the room, Gatsby says that Daisy’s voice is “full of money”. This strikes Nick as exactly true and somethi”ng he had not realised before. Then with his usual capacity to give a ‘richer’, poetic development to Gatsby’s ideas, he develops the voice as money idea as follows: “…that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it … High in a white palace, the King’s daughter, the golden girl.” Again, as with Nick’s account of the sight of New York (the buildings as “white heaps” and “sugar lumps”, the “non-olfactory money”), he is both captivated and critical: the quality of the seductive “charm” is undercut by the tinny, metallic suggestions of “jingle” and “cymbals” and one could choose to hear a caustic, ironic tone in his use of fairy tale language for Daisy’s exalted superiority.

Tom says he will go in Gatsby’s car and Gatsby in Tom’s coupe. Daisy says she will go with Gatsby and Tom should take Nick and Jordan. Tom, Nick and Jordan leave. Why does Tom want to drive Gatsby’s car? Now that he suspects that Gatsby and Daisy are having an affair, it is a way of asserting himself against Gatsby. Gatsby may be taking Tom’s wife so Tom will hit back by taking Gatsby’s car. Yet, there is a further reason. In a set of circumstances that are about to unfold, the plot needs Tom to be seen, by Myrtle, as the driver of the yellow convertible.

Tom, Nick and Jordan drive past Dr.T. J. Eckleburg’s faded eyes. They stop at Wilson’s garage for gas. Wilson comes out and Tom speaks roughly to him. Tom passes off Gatsby’s yellow car as his own. Wilson says he is sick and that he needs money as he is going West with his wife. Wilson says he knows she is having an affair – Nick sees that Wilson doesn’t know that Tom is her lover. Tom says he will send that car over tomorrow for Wilson to sell. Nick sees Myrtle Wilson looking out from behind her window and senses that Myrtle thinks that Jordan is Tom’s wife.

They catch up with the coupe. They go to the Plaza Hotel and engage the parlour suite. Tom becomes sneeringly critical of Gatsby’s use of “old sport”. Ironically, a wedding reception is taking place in the ballroom below. Daisy recalls her wedding and a wedding guest called Bill Biloxi. Tom sceptically questions Gatsby over being an Oxford man. Gatsby says he went to Oxford for five months in 1919. It was a post-war opportunity for ex US officers. Tom then tackles Gatsby on his involvement with Daisy. He takes on a moralistic criticism and sees Gatsby as destroying family life; Tom speaks as a defender of family values and adds a criticism of racially mixed marriages. Gatsby then comes out and tells Tom his wife doesn’t love him and that she always loved Gatsby and only married Tom as she was tired of waiting for Gatsby to return from the war. Tom denies this, insists that he and Daisy do love each other though he admits to his little sprees. Daisy turns on Tom scornfully and, on Gatsby’s insistence, tells Tom that she never loved him. But then backs down from this. She says she did love Tom once but loved Gatsby too. Gatsby is shocked by the “too”. Gatsby tells Tom that Daisy is going to leave him. Tom says that Gatsby is an associate of Meyer Wolfsheim and the drug-store business is just a front for boot-legging. Gatsby then says that Tom’s friend Walter Chase was prepared to be a part of the bootleg business. Tom turns this against Gatsby as he says Walter Chase now speaks damningly of Gatsby. And adds that it is known that Wolfsheim and Gatsby have something big going on now. Gatsby denies his criminality but Daisy is shocked and seems to draw into herself. Daisy pleads to leave. Tom, confident that Gatsby is no longer a threat, tells Daisy to leave with Gatsby. They do. Nick remembers that it is his birthday – he is 30. As they drive back Nick reflects on the ageing process and has rather sombre thoughts but draws some comfort from Jordan’s head on his shoulder.

Nick’s narrative then cuts to an account of an inquest and what “the young Greek”, Michaelis (the owner of the all-night restaurant next to Wilson’s garage) –“the principal witness” – told the coroner. After 5:00 pm Michaelis had wandered over to the garage where he found Wilson sick – “really sick”. He heard a racket from upstairs. Wilson explained that it was his wife whom he had locked in. Then Michaelis had to go back to his restaurant. Just after 7:00 pm he heard Mrs Wilson shouting and he thought her voice was coming from downstairs in the garage. Then she rushed out in the dusk and was run over – the car drove on. Michaelis was not sure of the colour of the car. Another car, a car that was travelling towards New York, stopped and along with Michaelis went and found Myrtle Wilson fatally injured and dead. Dying she was said to have “mingled her thick dark blood with the dust”; her injuries were such that her left breast was said to be “swinging loose like a flap”. Once again we see the dust and death connection and Myrtle’s mutilated left breast will have an ironic echo, when we read, in the novel’s closing paragraphs, of the “fresh green breast of the new world”.

At this point we may well be struck by the way the plot demands a particular chain of circumstances. All the main characters have to be at the Buchanan’s for the occasion when Gatsby wants Tom to be told that Daisy never loved him and that she wants a divorce. They all have to be there because when the decision is made to drive into New York they all need to go using their two cars. They have to go in two cars to create the circumstances that lead to Myrtle Wilson’s death. Tom has to drive into New York in Gatsby’s car and has to stop for petrol at Wilson’s garage so that Myrtle Wilson can see Tom in the yellow car. When they leave New York, Tom has to allow Daisy to leave in Gatsby’s car – he is casual about this as he no longer regarded Gatsby as a threat to his marriage. Daisy, despite the traumatic experience of the conversation in the hotel, has to want to drive Gatsby’s car (we later discover that she was driving). At the right moment, Myrtle Wilson has to break out of the bedroom Wilson has locked her in and has to recognize the speeding yellow car – which she thinks is Tom’s – which prompts her to run out into the road in an attempt to flag it down which then leads to the accident. This combination of chance factors contributes to the tragedy of Myrtle’s death and, as a consequence of her death (as we will see), to the revenge killing of Gatsby and the suicide of George Wilson. And this raises the question of the part played by chance and accident in Tragedy – that is to say, the genre of Tragedy. For more on this, see ‘Aspects of Tragedy’.

Nick then takes up his part in the story of what occurred on their return from New York. . As they had approached Wilson’s garage, they saw three or four parked cars and a crowd. Tom slowed and stopped and went to look. By now Myrtle Wilson’s corpse was on a worktable by the wall. A policeman was taking notes. Wilson was very distressed. Michaelis was explaining to the policeman what happened. Another witness – “a well-dressed negro” (a qualification that implies that it is at least noteworthy, if not surprising, that an Afro- American should be “well-dressed”) – said he saw the car, a big yellow car. Wilson hears this. Tom is anxious to convince Wilson that the yellow car he was in when he stopped for gas was not his car and that he hadn’t driven it after he completed the journey into town.

They go back to Tom’s house. As they drive back, Tom says, “The God damned coward… He didn’t even stop”. So at this point he seems convinced that Gatsby was driving. When they arrive at Tom’s house, Daisy is in. Nick doesn’t want to go in. Tom and Jordan go in – Tom says he will call a taxi for Nick. Gatsby steps out of the shadows. Nick tells him that the woman was killed. Gatsby reveals that Daisy was driving. He says that the woman ran towards the car as if towards someone that she knew. Clearly, having seen Tom with the car earlier, she thought Tom was in the car. Daisy couldn’t face stopping and so they stopped further on and Gatsby took over.

Nick wonders if Tom will discover that Daisy was driving. But will Daisy tell the truth? Nick goes back to the Buchanan house to check if all is quiet, which it is. He looks in through a window and sees Daisy and Tom together with an air of natural intimacy about them – they seemed to be conspiring together. Gatsby says he will stay until he sees the lights going out. Nick leaves him watching over nothing - after seeing Tom and Daisy together he knows that Gatsby has lost her.

Chapter 8

Next morning, Nick hears Gatsby return in a taxi and goes to see him. They talk. (This must be the occasion Nick refers to in Chapter VI where he says concerning the details of Gatsby’s past, “He told me all this very much later”.) Gatsby tells Nick about his Jay Gatz past and about what attracted him to Daisy when he was at Camp Taylor. Again, it is Nick’s verbal resourcefulness that articulates Gatsby’s experience. So he writes of Daisy’s beautiful house with its air of “breathless intensity”, its “ripe mystery”; “gay and radiant activities” take place through its corridors; “fresh romances” occur, romances that are “redolent of this year’s shining motor cars.” Nick adds that on “one still October night” Gatsby had “taken” Daisy “ravenously and unscrupulously”. The lustful passion suggested by these adverbs is in marked contrast to the previously used sentimental romanticism of their courtship – the “tuning fork struck upon a star”, the ‘blossoming “for him like a flower” which occurs at the end of Chapter VI. “Unscrupulously” is used because he had led her to believe that he was a person from the same social stratum as herself. – the war having given him officer status. He felt that he was in Daisy’s house by a “colossal accident”. (The words “accident” and “accidental” occur at various points and so echo the tragic car accident). And he had ended up being more in love with her than he anticipated . Nick says, again using the language of ‘high’ romance, in this case, Arthurian language, that “he had committed himself to the following of a grail”. But if Gatsby felt that he had taken advantage of Daisy, he failed to appreciate that Daisy’s status is such that she regards herself as invulnerable. She cannot be taken advantage of. So when they met two days after he had “taken her”, he is more like the one “breathless and betrayed”: Daisy is “gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”

In the war Gatsby did well: he was promoted to captain. After the war he was sent to Oxford – for a term, (a reward for American officers). He had no choice though he wanted to get back to Daisy. Daisy meanwhile couldn’t see why he didn’t return. Nick comments on her “artificial world” which was “redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes”. With a series of evocative images (and with the insight of an omniscient narrator! ), Nick continues to describe Daisy’s social world of that time. “All night the saxophones wailed the “Beale street Blues”; “rooms throbbed with this low sweet fever”. Daisy “began to move again with the season”; she dated various men and kept late nights that ended with her “drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed”. In the middle of spring, 1919, Tom arrived.

As dawn breaks over Long Island, Gatsby continues to hold that Daisy never loved Tom; she hardly knew what she was saying in the Plaza Hotel, Tom was putting her under pressure. Then, having conceded that Daisy may have loved Tom when they were first married, he adds what Nick describes as a “curious remark” when he says, of the Tom and Daisy love, “besides it was just personal”. Nick wonders did he mean that there was a special quality to the Gatsby/Daisy love, a quality which went beyond the merely personal? Was there a depth and an intensity in their love that couldn’t be measured? Gatsby adds that when returned from France he spent a week in Louisville whilst Daisy and Tom were on their wedding trip.

Nick eventually leaves for work promising that he would call at noon. Leaving, he pays a compliment to Gatsby –“you’re worth the whole damn bunch put together”. He says it was the only compliment he ever gave him “because I disapproved of him from beginning to end”. Once again we seem to have Nick’s distinction between Gatsby’s corrupt materialism, his criminality, and his “incorruptible dream”. A distinction that is mirrored in Nick between his morally upright, social self (“I am one of the few honest people…” p.48) and his Romantic self that articulates aspects of Gatsby’s experience in poetic terms.

At work, Nick takes a call from Jordan which becomes their final conversation. Nick phones Gatsby but the line is engaged.

Nick as narrator goes back over what happened the previous night at the garage. This adds further material which is presumably based on what Michaelis told the inquest. Michaelis stayed with Wilson overnight. Wilson at dawn had said to Michaelis that he had told Myrtle that she could not fool God. As he said this, Michaelis could see that Wilson was looking out at the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg and Wilson said God sees everything. To Wilson, Eckleburg is God. In the way he describes Eckleburg, Nick also sees him as if he were God, but a modern God reduced to a huge, battered advert with his giant eyes keeping an unsympathetic vigil over human affairs. Just after 6:00 am, Michaelis went home to sleep – four hours later he returned and Wilson had gone. Later, Wilson’s movements were traced. He had walked to and through Port Roosevelt and Gad’s Hill. Over the next three hours his movements were unknown. By 2:30 he was in East Egg. At 2:00 pm Gatsby went for a swim collecting and inflating a pneumatic mattress from the garage on his way. He left word that he was going to the pool and said he was expecting a phone call – presumably from Daisy.

Nick reckons that Gatsby knew that the call would not come and that his final time in the pool was one of losing the old, warm world, of having paid too high a price for living too long with a single dream. Nick imagines that Gatsby must have looked on a disturbing alien and alienating world where the sky is “unfamiliar”, leaves are “frightening”, a rose is “grotesque” and the sunlight is “raw”. A world which is “material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him… through the amorphous trees.” The ashen figure being the sickly and deranged Wilson who has come to avenge the death of his wife, having been told (as we later surmise) by Tom that Gatsby was driving the car that killed Myrtle Wilson. The chauffeur heard the shots but did nothing (he is one of Wolfsheim’s “people” and so ‘deaf’ to gunshots). Nick returned from work and went straight to Gatsby’s only to find him dead in the pool and then the gardener spotted George Wilson’s body (he had killed himself).

Chapter 9

Nick begins, “After two years I remember the rest of that day.” He recalls Myrtle’s sister at the inquest who said, protective of her sister’s reputation, that her sister was happily married… so the inquest concluded that Wilson was a man deranged by grief and that his victim was subject to a random attack.

Nick called Daisy half an hour after finding Gatsby but was told that she and Tom had “gone away … and taken baggage with them”. Nick recalls Gatsby saying, “You’ve got to get somebody for me…I can’t go through this alone…”, so Nick struggles to get mourners for the funeral. He asks Wolfsheim to come but gets a wire saying he can’t come. When Nick is back at Gatsby’s he takes a ‘business’ call from a man called Slagle who reveals that “Young Parke’s in trouble”, he was picked up when he “handed the bonds over at the counter”. Nick says that Gatsby is dead and the line goes silent and clicks off.

On the third day after Gatsby’s death, a telegram arrives from Gatsby’s father, Henry C Gatz, saying he was on his way to attend the funeral. When he arrives he shows grief mixed with pride in his son’s success. He does not seem to be aware of his criminal activities.

That night Klipspringer rings. Nick assumes that he wants the funeral time but in fact he wants a pair of tennis shoes posted on to him. Nick hangs up.

On the morning of the funeral, Nick goes to see Wolfsheim. Eventually he manages to see him in his office. Wolfsheim reveals something of how Gatsby came to be in ‘business’ with him. However, he can’t go to the funeral. He says that he can’t get involved when a man gets killed.

Back at Gatsby’s, Gatsby’s father reveals that Gatsby came to see him about two years ago and bought him the house he is now living in. He shows Nick a Hopalong Cassidy book that his son had as a child with Gatsby’s self-improvement schedule dated Sept. 12, 1906 written in the flyleaf.

A Lutheran minister comes to conduct the funeral service. They wait for mourners, but none come. At 5 o’clock they leave in a procession/cortege of three cars: the hearse, a limousine with Nick, Mr Gatz and the minister and Gatsby’s station wagon bringing a few of Gatsby’s servants and the West Egg postman. Then another car came with the man with the owl-eyed glasses who, seeing the lack of mourners, says of Gatsby, “the poor son-of-a-bitch”. It is raining and Nick recalls, “Dimly I heard someone murmur…blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.”

The narrative then jumps to Nick recalling his train journeys home from school or college, journeying West. There is a lyrical nostalgia in the evocative way he recalls these Christmas return journeys which he sees as a journey into the heartland, the essence, of the Middle West. In the opening of his Gatsby story Nick said that after he returned from service in the First World War he felt that “Instead of being the warm centre of the world”, the Middle West “seemed like the ragged edge of the universe”. This prompted him “to go East and learn the bond business”. As he ends his story, having decided, as autumn advanced, to return home, he draws comfort from recollections of returning to the Middle West and from feeling that the Middle West is where he belongs. He now sees that he and Jordan, Tom and Daisy and Gatsby were all Middle Western people, an identity which made them “subtly unadaptable to Eastern life”. He sees the East as a place of excitement but distortion. He now pictures West Egg as an El Greco landscape (Google, El Greco: ‘View of Toledo’) with its houses at night “crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky” with four solemn men in dress suits in the foreground carrying a stretcher which bears “a drunken woman in a white evening dress”. Nick’s vision of “distortion” has some affinity with his account of Gatsby’s final vision with its own form of distortion in which the sky becomes “unfamiliar”, the rose “grotesque”, the sunlight “raw’ and the grass “scarcely created”.

He sees Jordan for the last time. She says that he “threw” her over on the telephone. She also says she made a mistake in thinking that Nick was an “honest straightforward person”. They part with Nick feeling “half in love with her, and tremendously sorry”.

One afternoon in late October, Nick sees Tom Buchanan in Fifth Avenue. He confronts him with, “What did you say to Wilson that afternoon?” So showing that he knows that Wilson went to Tom first to trace the owner of the yellow car. Tom says that Wilson threatened to kill him unless Tom told him who was the owner of the car. Tom told him it was Gatsby’s car and told him where he lived. Tom says that Gatsby had it coming to him since he ran Myrtle over “like you’d run over a dog” and did not stop. It seems that he does not know, or chooses not to know, that Daisy was the driver. He says that he too suffered over the death of Myrtle. He refers to the time when he gave up “that flat” and “cried like a baby” when he saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard” – you will recall the dog that Myrtle bought when they went to the New York flat. Nick concludes,

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy.” In the end. Nick shakes hands with him – he sees Tom as a child.

On Nick’s last night in West Egg, he goes down to the shore. He links the place back to the original Dutch settlers and their first sight of the “fresh green breast of the New World”. He writes lyrically of how man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, of being “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” This way of putting it makes a link with Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. The novel closes with this celebrated ending:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

End notes

The American Dream

The phrase ‘the American dream’ is one which often occurs in discussions of The Great Gatsby. The phrase can be briefly defined as the ideal by which equality of opportunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirations and goals to be achieved. The emphasis of this ‘dream’ is on the individual rather than the community and what it offers is the opportunity to climb to the top of the social ladder. A climb that brings social status and, inevitably, wealth. The dream’s idealism lies in its belief in the value of each human being, but its goals will be enhanced social status and the materialism of conspicuous wealth. In some ways, Gatsby can be seen as fulfilling this American Dream. He did not settle for the lowly status he was born into. A combination of factors made him rich and placed him amongst New York’s nouveau riche – though note that, notwithstanding the American dream, equality has its limits in that ‘old money’ of East Egg looks down on West Egg. These favourable factors can be listed as follows: unlimited self-belief; good luck in his chance meeting with Dan Cody; the First World War that elevated him to officer status which gave him his passport into Daisy’s social circle; his chance meeting with Wolfsheim and his unabashed willingness to engage in crime.

Gatsby’s story in its ‘rags to riches’ progress can be seen as an example of the American dream, but, as a dream, it also has other strands running through it. These strands are of a non-materialistic nature. They have spiritual, religious qualities and qualities associated with romance and even with Romantic poetry. To cite a few examples of these strands. According to Nick, the young Jay Gatsby felt that he was a son of God who was called upon to go about his Father’s business. His initial romance with Daisy led to a visionary moment one autumn night whilst they were walking together – see the closing paragraphs of Chapter VI. There was a “mysterious excitement” in the air, “there was a stir and bustle among the stars” and in that moment, Gatsby saw that the “sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place among the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder”. Romance leads Gatsby to experience an epiphany in a form of visionary transformation which Nick describes in what I think could be called a Romantic prose poem. A poem that makes use of Biblical allusion since the ladder image recalls the ladder that Jacob sees in a dream (see Genesis 28). A further example of religious allusion can be seen in Chapter VIII. Concerning his romance with Daisy, he “found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail”. This is an allusion to the Holy Grail, the legendary chalice which Christ is said to have used at the Last Supper. In Arthurian legend it is sought by Sir Galahad as a spiritual quest. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the light that symbolises both Daisy and Gatsby’s longing for her, is transformed by Gatsby the questor from useful navigation aid to an “enchanted’”, quasi-celestial object. Thus, Biblical references, Romantic poetry, Arthurian legend and spiritual and religious qualities are all used to express Gatsby’s dream. At the same time, Nick includes the materialistic strand of the American dream since Gatsby is also said to be in the “service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty”. One can qualify this “service” by saying that in Gatsby’s eyes it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. He is in that vulgar world but he is not of it. He acquires wealth in order to fulfil his romantic dreams. When showing Daisy around his house, Nick says that he valued everything according to “the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes”.

Gatsby wanted his story to exemplify the American dream of progress, a linear forward movement in time that would reach its end with Daisy as his wife. However, in the process of telling this story we are frequently taken into the past. These returns to the past make for a counter current, an undertow, to the narrative’s forward momentum. Gatsby takes us there with his versions of his own past. Jordan takes us there with her account of her “white girlhood” in Louisville with Daisy and her account of Daisy’s marriage. Wolfsheim takes us into his first meeting with Gatsby. Michaelis takes us into the recent past with his details of the accident. Gatsby’s father provides a few details of Gatsby’s childhood. After Gatsby’s death, Nick draws comfort from his past by recalling journeys home from school. At his account closes, he takes himself and, in imagination at least, all the main characters home to what he identifies as their Western origins and so, in a sense to their past: “Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners” (p.140) .

When Nick ends his story of Gatsby, he imagines the distant past of the European discovery of America through the eyes of Dutch sailors. According to Nick, what they saw was another Eden, a “fresh green breast” of a “new world”. This is a place of wonder that inspires “aesthetic contemplation” rather than what can be suggested by the American dream, that is, opportunities for personal advantage and the accumulation of wealth. This wonder-inspiring discovery then modulates into Gatsby’s wonder when he “first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock”. This in turn modulates into the green light of the future that “year by year recedes before us” (my italics). Thus Gatsby’s story becomes, not the embodiment of the America dream, but a universal story which is our story as “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Romantic/romantic

Romantic with an initial capital letter is the adjective from Romanticism [capital ‘R’]. Romanticism is a movement in the arts in Europe which, according to most cultural histories, began in the late eighteenth century, had its finest period in the early nineteenth century and then persisted in less original, weaker forms through the nineteenth century before being challenged by Modernism. Romantic artists – in English Romanticism this chiefly means poets – placed an emphasis on the power of the imagination to ‘see’ into the heart of things and to enter into a transcendent realm (the ‘real’ reality) which went beyond everyday, mundane ‘reality’ (the apparent and lesser reality).

Romantic with a small ‘r’ is usually used to refer to things related to love. How often do we hear of a ‘romantic evening’, a ‘romantic candle-lit dinner’, a ‘romantic moonlit scene’ et cetera? In other words, love of this ‘romantic’ kind usually has connotations of being idealised and sentimentalised. This kind of romanticism is often contrasted with realism. So we might hear, “We began with the romantic honeymoon but then we came home to the reality of mortgage and the unglamorous world of daily routine’. This kind of ‘romantic’ proves to be less real than everyday ‘reality’.

The word ‘romantic’ in Gatsby is used ten times⁹ and always with a small ‘r’ but its meaning seesaws between big-R Romantic and little-r romantic. To take some examples:  when Nick uses it in Chapter I to refer to Gatsby (“a romantic readiness”) he intends a meaning closer to Romantic. Daisy’s use of the word in her “it’s very romantic outdoors” [see page 20] conveys the lesser sentimental sense, though, as has been suggested, when taken with her mention of the nightingale, it unwittingly evokes Romanticism. When Nick says of Gatsby that he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder he intends a ‘high’ Romanticism, a visionary, transformative power in Gatsby’s imagination.

⁹ See pages 8, 19, 20, 27, 46, 57, 73, and 105.

Daisy’s Voice and Materialistic Values

Gatsby defines what he sees as the essence of Daisy’s voice when he says her “voice is full of money” [p. 115]. Nick is suddenly struck by the accuracy of this: “That was it. I’d never understood it before. It was full of money – that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…” It seems thatNick has also been seduced by money. Yet, whilst acknowledging this and the inexhaustible nature of the charm in Daisy’s moneyed voice, the very terms with which Nick elaborates on Gatsby’s definition imply a critique of the power of money and privilege. The figurative terms “jingle” and “cymbals” suggest something tinkling and meretricious; the elevation of Daisy to regal status in a white palace is more sardonic in tone than adulatory.

And this is typical of Nick as narrator. When he steps back into narrator mode, he is frequently critical of the materialism that he witnesses. He describes James Gatz’s reinvention of himself as Jay Gatsby in the terms of a religious vocation, but a corrupt one since it is in the service of Mammon, the service of “a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” [p 95]. Nick says of Gatsby, “I disapproved of him from beginning to end” which I think has to be taken to mean, ‘I disapproved of his corrupt materialism’ – something that Nick distinguishes from Gatsby’s incorruptible dream [pages 146/7]. Drawing a distinction between Gatsby being in the materialistic world but not of it, one could argue that Nick’s disapproval is of the materialism rather than of Gatsby himself. When describing Gatsby’s party, he sees the corrupting influence of the prevailing material values. Spotting the number of young Englishmen dotted about, he comments, “They were aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key”. He sees the superficial gaudiness of the party with its vacuous laughter, its introductions forgotten on the spot, its enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

Yet as a character within the story Nick is seduced by Daisy’s moneyed voice. He is also drawn to Jordan Baker whom he recognises is a clean, hard limited person but with her “slender golden arm” resting in his [p. 44] or with his arm around her “golden shoulder” [p 77] Nick too serves a materially privileged beauty. Although he claims to be, in essence, of the American West, and aware of the distorted values of the East he is, he admits, excited [p 167] by the East This excitement seems to be illustrated by his habit of walking up Fifth Avenue and picking out romantic women … and imagining that he was going to enter into their lives or by his description of Gatsby’s party where, notwithstanding the criticisms previously noted, he is taken by its colour, its vivacity, its sharp joyous moments.