Great Gat

Chapter 1
Summary
Nick Carraway is a narrator of the story. He introduced the characters and setting of the book. Nick is a young man from Minnesota who grew up in the prominent, well to do family. He graduated from New Haven in 1915 and a little later served in the military in Great War. The narrator briefly mentions the hero of the story- Gatsby. He says: “Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament” – it was ea extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No- Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul of dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of man.”
After the war he returned to the Midwest. The counter- raid enjoyed him so thoroughly that he came back restless. Now the Midwest seemed him like the ragged edge of the universe. That’s why he decided to go east and learn the bond business. He has rented a home on West Egg one of two identical egg-shaped islands located on Long Island Sound, 20 miles from the city. His house is a weather beaten cardboard bungalow renting for eighty dollars per month. He has an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made him bad and cooked the breakfast. His house was an eyesore between two large mansions. The one of his right was a colossal affair by any standard – it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. Nick has learned that the owner of this mansion was Mr. Jay Gatsby.
The history of the summer begins when one evening Nick drives out to West Egg to have a dinner with his cousin once removed Daisy. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth- but there was an excitement in her voice that man who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen” She was dressed in a lightweight, white garment that is ripping on the breeze, giving the young woman the image of floating. She appears to be light as a feather. The total contrast of her husband Tom Buchanan, Nick knew him in college. Tom’s family was enormously wealthy. He was a sturdy, straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and supercilious manner, Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. He has the enormous power of the body. It was a body capable of enormous leverage-a cruel body. His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed.
Throughout the evening, Daisy tells to Nick about her plans. When Nick looks in her eyes he saw the true Daisy, for they hold a sadness and absence of desire. Tom tries to interest the others in a book The Rise of the Colored Empires, the book about racist, white-supremacist attitudes that Tom seems to find convincing. The conversation was interrupted by the phone call. Tom leave the room, Daisy follows him. In this time, Miss Baker, tell Nick that Tom’s got some woman in New York.
After an artless dinner, the party breaks up. Jordan wants to go to bed because she has a golf tournament the next day. As Nick leaves, Tom and Daisy hint that they would like for him to take a romantic interest in Jordan. When Nick arrives home, he stands outside to take in the view of the bay. He notices that his neighbor is also outside, staring at the stars with hands in his pocket. Just as Nick prepares to greet him, the neighbor stretches out his arms to the dark water and appears to tremble. Nick looks out to the bay to see what attracts the neighbor’s attention, but he sees only a single green light, probably at the end of a dock in East Egg. When Nick looks back toward his neighbor, the man has vanished. What an appropriate first glimpse of the mysterious Gatsby.

Chapter 2
Summary
This chapter begins with a description of the desolate area of land between West Egg and New York City- Valley of Ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the form houses and chimneys and rising smokes and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. But above this grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, a huge advertisement painted with eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelberg. The eyes of Doctor T.J.Ecklburg are blue and gigantic- their retinas are one yard high. The look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. On the Valley of Ashes Nick first met Tom Buchanan mistress Myrtle Wilson. One Sunday afternoon in July, Tom decided to acquaintance Nick with his lover Myrtle. Tom says, “I want you to meet my girl.” They walk through three shops; the third was a Wilson’s garage and Repair Shop. George Wilson was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. His wife Myrtle was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face above the spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. Tom taunts George with a promise to sell him his automobile and tells Myrtle to get on the next train. She is always ready to escape from the Valley of Ashes, and gladly compels Tom. She discreetly sits in the next car, away from her lover. They went up together to New York, to the Morningside Heights apartment he keeps for his affair. Here they have an impromptu party with Myrtle’s sister, Catherine, and a couple named McKee. Catherine was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty a solid sticky bob with a red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eye-brows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. Catherine tells Nick that she has heard that Jay Gatsby is the nephew or cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm, the ruler of Germany during World War I. The McKees, who live downstairs, are a horrid couple: Mr. McKee is pale and feminine from the flat below, and Mrs. McKee is shrill. The group proceeds to drink excessively. Nick claims that he got drunk for only the second time in his life at this party.
The showy behavior and conversation of the others at the party spurn Nick, and he tries to leave. At the same time, he finds himself fascinated by the lurid spectacle of the group. Myrtle grows louder and more obnoxious the more she drinks, and shortly after Tom gives her a new puppy as a gift, she begins to talk about Daisy. Tom insists that she not even mention his wife’s name. When Myrtle taunts him by shouting, “Daisy! Daisy!...I’ll say it whenever I want to,” Tom answers by striking her face and breaking her nose. Nick’s sense of moral order is repulsed by the violence, and he leaves in an alcoholic stupor, finally catching the 4:00 a.m. train back to West Egg.

Chapter 3
Summary
The third chapter is a description the party in the house of the Jay Gatsby. Gatsby invited Nick to his party. Gatsby’s party is almost unbelievably luxurious: guests marvel over his Rolls-Royce, his swimming pool, his beach, crates of fresh oranges and lemons, buffet tents in the gardens overflowing with a feast, and a live orchestra playing under the stars. Liquor flows freely, and the crowd grows rowdier and louder as more and more guests get drunk. A guest picked to pieces about Gatsby- no one seems to know the truth about Jay’s wealth or personal history. Nick met Jordan with her friend Lucille, speculates that Gatsby was German spy during the war. Also Nick hears that Gatsby is graduate Oxford and once killed a man. Nick and Jordon go out and were going to find the host. Instead, they run into a middle aged man with enormous owl eyed spectacles who sits on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of a books and somewhat drunk.
At midnight, the party is still going strong with dancing, music, and “stunts” in the garden. Nick notes that “the hilarity had increased. . .while happy vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky.” Nick is sitting at a table with Jordan and an unknown man his age and rowdy little girl. The man tells Nick that his face is familiar, and the two of them discover that they had both been in the Third Division during the war. The gentleman then warms towards Nick, calls him “old sport” repeatedly, and asks him to take a ride in his newly purchased hydroplane on the next morning. After the invitation, Nick was surprised to learn that this gentleman is Jay Gatsby himself. When Gatsby leaves to take a phone call, Nick admits to Jordan, “I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years.” He then asks Jordan to tell him more about this mysterious man. Jordan simply replies, “He’s just a man named Gatsby,” a classical example of understatement.
Not long after, a butler tells Jordan that Gatsby would like to see her. Jordan emerges from her meeting with Gatsby saying that she has just heard something extraordinary. Nick says goodbye to Gatsby, who goes inside to take a phone call from Philadelphia. Nick starts to walk home. On his way, he sees Owl Eyes struggling to get his car out of a ditch. Owl Eyes and another man climb out of the wrecked automobile, and Owl Eyes drunkenly declares that he washes his hands of the whole business.
Nick describes his everyday life; he proves that he does more with his time than simply attend parties. He works in New York City, through which he also takes long walks, and he meets women. After a brief relationship with a girl from Jersey City, Nick decided follows the advice of Daisy and Tom and begins seeing Jordan Baker. Nick says that Jordan is fundamentally a dishonest person; he even knows that she cheated in her first golf tournament. Nick feels attracted to her despite her dishonesty, even though he himself claims to be one of the few honest people he has ever known.

Chapter 4
Summary
Once Nick decided to write down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby's parties in the summer of 1922. Distinguished and well-known people of both East and West Egg came to his house and enjoyed the food and music that he had provided for them, even though none of them knew him.
At the morning Gatsby suggested to Nick having a lunch. They’re ride up together on the Gatsby’s car. While they are driving in Gatsby's car one day to meet Jordan for lunch, Gatsby tells Nick a framed-up account of his past life. He tells Nick that he was a son of some wealthy people in the Middle West and that he had traveled extensively all over the world after their death. He says that he educated at Oxford, but Nick notices that he seems a little bit nervous as he boasts about his education, as if he were, as Jordan had believed, lying about his past. Gatsby goes on to boast of his triumphs during the war and even shows Nick a medal that he had received from Montenegro for his courage and strength. Nick suspected that Gatsby's pulling his leg but is still amazed by Gatsby's sincere belief that he is, in fact, telling the truth about himself and his past.
A policeman stops them on the road, but Gatsby takes out a white card from his pocket, and the cop quickly apologizes for stopping him. Gatsby tells Nick that he had once done the police commissioner a favor, and this incident first alerts Nick to Gatsby's illegal practices.
When they are about to meet Jordan for lunch, they went to met one of Gatsby's friend, Meyer Wolfshiem, who, as Gatsby later tells Nick, is the gambler responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series. Wolfshiem and Gatsby conversation for a bit, and Wolfshiem, mistaking Nick for someone who Gatsby had told him about, asks Nick if he would like to be involved in a business negotiation. Gatsby quickly cuts Wolfshiem off from finishing his offer and whisks Nick away from Wolfshiem's table. At the restaurant, Nick and Gatsby run into Tom Buchanan, and after Nick introduces an awkward Gatsby to Tom, Gatsby disappears before they are to meet Jordan.
Nick learnt from Jordan that Gatsby and Daisy had been in love before she had married Tom. Daisy had been just eighteen, she was the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville, and while Gatsby was stationed there during the war, the two had met and promised themselves to each other in October of 1917. But Gatsby was sent to Europe, and after Daisy moped around the house for a few days, she got back into the swing of things and became engaged to the wealthy and prominent Tom Buchanan. Even though Daisy had let go of their love, Gatsby had clung on to it for dear life, and he believed that once he returned to the States after the war, he would be able to reclaim his Daisy. Jordan later reveals to Nick that Gatsby wants him to re-introduce him to Daisy five years after the war had separated them.

Chapter 5
Summary
When Nick came home he thought that his house was in fire it was found that, Gatsby’s house is ablaze with lights from tower to cellar, but there is no party and no sound. When Nick’s taxi groaned away he saw Gatsby walking toward him across his lawn. Gatsby suggested him go to Coney Island or take a plunge on the swimming pool. Nick declines the invitations but tells Gatsby what he really wants to hear. He will call up Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea. Gatsby again emphasizes that he does not want to put his neighbor to any trouble. The next day Nick calls Daisy, invites her to tea, and tells her not to bring Tom.
On the morning of Daisy’s visit, scheduled for four p.m., it is pouring rain, but a gardener, sent by Gatsby, still comes and cuts Nick’s grass. At two p.m., a virtual greenhouse of flowers, complete with containers, arrives from Gatsby. An hour later, the front door opened nervously and Gatsby in a white flannel suite, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie hurried in. He was pale and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes. Jay tries to calm his nerves by reading, but it was unsuccessful. Finally, at a little before four o’clock, he announces that obviously no one is coming to tea, and he is going home. Before he can depart, under the dripping bare lilac trees a large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy’s face tipped sideways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at Nick with bright ecstatic smile. She asks Nick in her rippling voice, “Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?” She is obviously amazed at the size and appearance of the small bungalow. When Daisy and Nick enter the house, Gatsby has disappeared. He soon, however, knocks at the front door, and Nick finds him outside “pale as death with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets and standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.” Gatsby comes inside to the living room, and Daisy, in a clear, artificial voice, tells him how glad she is to see him again. Nick wants this meeting at his house to be a success, so he leaves the two of them alone for awhile.
When Nick returned the living room, Daisy explains him that she has not seen Gatsby for many years, and Gatsby immediately adds that it has been five years next November, betraying his devotion to Daisy. Fortunately, the awkward moment is broken with the Finnish housekeeper bringing in the tea. In the confusion of cups and cakes, Gatsby gets up, stands away in a shadow, and surveys the scene with tense, unhappy eyes. When Nick goes out to the kitchen, Gatsby follows and moans, “Oh, God! This is a terrible mistake.” Nick tries to comfort his neighbor by telling him that Daisy is as embarrassed as he is. Nick then scolds Gatsby, saying he is acting like a little boy and being rude by leaving Daisy all alone. When Gatsby returns to the living room, Nick goes outside to the back yard, observes his neighbor’s house for thirty minutes, and gives the history of the mansion.
Then Gatsby invite Daisy and Nike to his house. Nick doesn’t want to go with Daisy and Gatsby, but Jay insists to come. Nick agrees. When they‘re entered the house. Daisy admires of the mansion, admired the gardens. The three of them then enter the mansion trough the front door with the gold kiss-me-nots at the gate. Inside, the trio wanders through the music rooms, the salons and the library. Upstairs they visit the bedroom. Finally they come to Gatsby’s own apartment. Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy sit down and have a drink.
Gatsby is giving Nick and Daisy tour of his house.Talk then turns to the photographs in Gatsby’s room. He explains that the elderly gentleman is Mr.Dan Cody, who before his death used to be Gatsby’s best friend.
Not long after, Nick takes his leave from Daisy and Gatsby. Nick notices that Gatsby’s face shows bewilderment. How could Daisy possibly live up to the illusion that he created about her? She was a dream into which he had thrown himself with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. But Daisy’s voice would always be enchanting with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed - that voice was a deathless song.
Chapter 6
Summary
A young reporter from New York arrived one morning to Gatsby’s mansion hoping to interview him. The narrator tells the true story about Jay Gatsby.
The real name of Jay Gatsby is James Gatz. He is from North Dakota farm. Gatsby attended college at St. Olaf’s in Minnesota, he dropped out after two weeks. He worked on Lake Superior the next summer fishing for salmon and digging for clams. One day, he saw a yacht owned by Dan Cody, a wealthy copper mogul, and rowed out to warn him about an impending storm. The grateful Cody took young Gatz, who gave his name as Jay Gatsby, on board his yacht as his personal assistant. Traveling with Cody to the Barbary Coast and the West Indies, Gatsby fell in love with wealth and luxury. Cody was a heavy drinker, and one of Gatsby’s jobs was to look after him during his drunken binges. This gave Gatsby a healthy respect for the dangers of alcohol and convinced him not to become a drinker himself. When Cody died, he left Gatsby $25,000, but Cody’s mistress prevented him from claiming his inheritance. Gatsby then dedicated himself to becoming a wealthy and successful man.
Nick didn’t see Gatsby for several weeks. Stopping by Gatsby’s house one afternoon, he is alarmed to find Tom Buchanan there. Tom has stopped for a drink at Gatsby’s house with Mr. and Mrs. Sloane, with whom he has been out riding. Gatsby seems nervous, and tells Tom that he knows Daisy. Gatsby invites Tom and the Sloanes to stay for dinner, but they refuse. To be polite, they invite Gatsby to dine with them, and he accepts, not realizing the insincerity of the invitation. Tom is contemptuous of Gatsby’s lack of social grace and highly critical of Daisy’s habit of visiting Gatsby’s house alone. He is suspicious, but he has not yet discovered Gatsby and Daisy’s love.
After party Gatsby was unhappy because Daisy has had such an unpleasant time. Gatsby wants that everything was as before: he wants Daisy to leave Tom so that he can be with her. Nick reminds Gatsby that he cannot return the past. Gatsby, believes that his money can accomplish anything as far as Daisy is concerned. As he walks amid the debris from the party, Nick thinks about the first time Gatsby kissed Daisy, the moment when his dream of Daisy became the dominant force in his life. Now that he has her, Nick reflects, his dream is effectively over.

Chapter 7
Summary
It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night- and, as obscurely as it had begun his career as Trimalchio. Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his house and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never went into West Egg Village it was Wolfshiem brothers and sisters. He was afraid the gossips about him and Daisy.
Daisy invites Gatsby, Nick and Jordan to lunch. It is an extremely hot day. Daisy wants to show off her daughter. She dressed up her in white, to her guests. Tom joins his guests and comments about the heat that he read that the sun is getting hotter and soon the earth will fall into it ' or rather that the sun is getting colder. Daisy makes an offhand remark that she loves Gatsby, which Tom overhears.
When Tom goes inside to get a drink, Nick remarks that Daisy has an indiscreet voice. Gatsby says that her voice is "full of money." After the conversation between Tom and Gatsby, they all decide to drive to New York for diversion. Gatsby and Daisy take Tom's car though Tom doesn’t want it. Tom drives with Nick and Jordan in Gatsby's new yellow roadster.
As Tom speeds towards New York, he decides to spin by Wilson's gas station to torment Mr. Wilson for a few minutes. At the station, Nick notices Myrtle peering out her second-story window. Meanwhile, Wilson was relating to Tom how he suspects that his wife was involved with another man, and how the two of them would soon be moving west. Feeling slandered and confused, Tom punches the gas pedal and races off toward the city.
Arriving in New York, they are to go to the Plaza Hotel to last out the heat sipping mint juleps. But soon Tom and Gatsby become confuse in a fiery argument. In anger, Gatsby roars that Daisy was in love with him now. What's more, he asserts that Daisy never did love Tom. Tom shouts that it was a lie, then turns to Daisy for excuse. Although she wants to side with Gatsby, she cannot. I can't say I never loved Tom.... It wouldn't be true, she stuttered. Tom confronts Gatsby with the information that he has found out and calls him a "common swindler and bootlegger."
Gatsby heads for home in his roadster with Daisy at his side; Tom, Nick and Jordan drive a few miles behind. Suddenly, Tom's group comes upon the scene of an accident in front of Wilson's gas station. A woman, Myrtle Wilson, has been run over and killed; the "yellow car" that had hit her hadn't even stopped. Tom, convinced that Gatsby had struck Myrtle, drove hurriedly on home. Tears streamed down his face. "The God damned coward!" he whimpered, "He didn't even stop his car." Even though Jordan tries to persuade Nick to stay at the Buchanans after their eventual night, Nick just wants to get away from them all and walks out of the Buchanan house. Even before he leaves their lawn, Gatsby steps out from behind the front bushes and asks Nick if she was killed. He reveals to Nick that Daisy was the one driving the car and that she had tried to swerve away from Myrtle when she had run screaming in front of the car but hadn't been able to stop the car. Gatsby tells Nick that he is going to stay at the Buchanan house to make sure that Daisy is safe, even if he has to stay there the entire night. He and Nick tiptoe to peek inside the Buchanans' kitchen, and they see Daisy and Tom quietly talking to each other, and Tom is comforting Daisy, covering her hand with his own. Even though they don't seem glowingly happy, there is a special air of intimacy surrounding them that Gatsby could never break into. Nick realizes that keeping a vigil over Daisy would be futile, and he leaves Gatsby standing in the darkness, who hopes that his invisible presence will somehow comfort her.

Chapter 8
Summary
The next morning Nick talks with Gatsby. Nothing happened to Daisy, and Nick advises Gatsby to move away because the police will trace his car and convict him of murder. Gatsby wouldn’t think hear of it though.
That night Gatsby tells Nick the story of his youth with Daisy. They met in Louisville when Gatsby was stationed there for the army. She was the first girl he felt a real connection with. He loved her fullness of life, her youthful energy, and her voice. The only reason he lied to her about his background was to make her think that he was good enough for her. When he had to leave overseas, Daisy promised him she would wait for him to return so they could get married. There were some complications after the fighting, however, that caused Gatsby to delay his return home. Daisy didn’t understand why he couldn’t come and the sadness and despair in her letters worried Gatsby. Months went by and Gatsby still didn’t come. She decided her life needed shaping, even if it was without Gatsby. When Tom Buchanan came she took the opportunity and married him in June.
After the flashback and breakfast, the gardener tells Gatsby that he’s going to drain the pool for the fall. Gatsby, having never used the pool all summer, decides use it today. Gatsby invites Nick in also, but he declines the invitation for he has to go into town. While in town, Nick tires to get some work done, but ends up falling asleep. He wakes up to the phone ringing and it is Jordan Baker. They’re conversation is bitter towards one another and ends in silence.
Meanwhile, George Wilson, still sad and confused about his wife, seeks out Tom Buchanan in hopes of some answers. Tom tells him that he suspected Gatsby of driving the car that hit Myrtle. Taking revenge, George goes to Gatsby’s house and kills him while he was sitting in his pool. After he killed Gatsby, George killed himself close by.

Chapter 9
Summary
The rest of the day had been imprinted in Nicks mind for more than two years after the fact. Photographers and reporters swarm Gatsby’s house, and make up stories which were extremely elaborated.
Nick, thinking Gatsby needs a funeral, starts planning it. He calls many people who, unfortunately, are not interested at all in attending Gatsby’s funeral. When he tries Daisy’s house, a servant answers the phone saying Tom and Daisy had gone away. They left no address of where they would be or when they would arrive back to East Egg. Meyer Wolfsheim also could not attend the funeral because he doesn’t want to be part of Gatsby’s death.
Later, Nick receives a telegram from Henry C. Gatz, saying he is on his way to West Egg and to postpone the funeral until he arrives. When he arrives in West Egg, Nick was surprised to find out Henry C. Gatz is Gatsby’s father. Mr. Gatz always thought Gatsby had a big future ahead of him. Unfortunately, he was the only one who thought highly of him and also one of the few who attended Gatsby’s funeral. The other people were Nick, a few servants, and later Owl Eyes.
When the drama quiets down, Nick decides it is time to return home to the Mid-West, but not before he ends things with Jordan Baker. When they see each other Nick compliments her, and in response she tells him she was engaged to another man. She explains she was still mad from their last phone conversation and doesn’t care about Nick anymore. She lastly mentions her being engaged to a bad driver, the same remark Nick made to her when they first met. She thought Nick was a very honest and honorable man, but due to recent events was proved otherwise.
Nick later passed Tom walking down the street. Nick asks him what he told George the afternoon Gatsby was killed. Tom responds by saying he told George the truth. He said George had a gun to his head and demanded to know who killed Myrtle, so in order to stay alive, he told him it was Gatsby. Along with that, Tom says Gatsby deserved to die, and because of that remark Nick could never forgive Tom Buchanan.
On the last night in West Egg for Nick, he looks at Gatsby’s house and see it as a failure. He sits on Gatsby’s beach and sees the green light Gatsby had been reaching for when they first met. Nick believes Gatsby saw something in that light, and his dream was across the bay. Nick looks back on the events that have gone by, and realizes everyone was trying to manipulate their futures in different ways. Unfortunately, instead of moving forward, they repeated the mistakes of their past.

Themes
Vision of America.
Chapter 1
p.5
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.
p.9
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. [...] Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
p.31
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
Chapter 4
p.85
"Good morning, old sport. You’re having lunch with me to-day and I thought we’d ride up together." He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.
p.98
"Meyer Wolfsheim? No, he’s a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: "He's the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919." "Fixed the World’s Series?" I repeated. The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. "How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute. "He just saw the opportunity." "Why isn’t he in jail?" "They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man."
Chapter 5
p. 110
"If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
Chapter 9
p. 232-233
I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: "Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?" and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate. When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again. That's my Middle West – not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.
p.239
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.
p.235
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 orgiastic 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.
Society and Class
Chapter 1
p. 3
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had." He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments […].
p.4
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
p.4
When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.
p.9
I lived at West Egg, the – well, the least fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard – it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
p.17
"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there." "I don’t know a single——" "You must know Gatsby." "Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"
p.19-20
"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can’t you talk about crops or something?" I meant nothing in particular by that remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way. "Civilization’s going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?" "Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone. "Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved." "Tom’s getting very profound," said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—" "Well these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things. "We’ve got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun."
p.26
Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich – nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away.
Chapter 2
p.45
"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep after them all the time."
Chapter 3
p.53
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and he champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his motor-boats slid the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
p.72
"All right, old sport," called Gatsby. We slowed down. Taking a white card from his wallet, he waved it before a man's eyes. "Right you are," agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. "Know you next time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse me!" "What was that?" I inquired. "The picture from Oxford?" "I was able to do the commissioner a favor once, and he sends me a Christmas card every year." Chapter 4
p. 91
The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night. "Anyways, for an hour!"
Chapter 6
p.130
I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
p.132
He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore.
p.134
At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of them elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick and extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap. And when the Toulumne left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left too.
p.143
But the rest offended her – and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village – appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
Chapter 7
p. 163
That was it. I’d never understood 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...
Chapter 8
p.201
Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately – and the decision must be made by some force – of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality – that was close at hand.
Chapter 9
p.220
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...
Education
Chapter 1
p.6
I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.
Chapter 7
p.162
"About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small investigation of his past." "And you found he was an Oxford man," said Jordan helpfully. "An Oxford man!" He was incredulous. "Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.""Nevertheless he’s an Oxford man.""Oxford, New Mexico," snorted Tom contemptuously, "or something like that.""Listen, Tom. If you’re such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?" demanded Jordan crossly. "Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were married – God knows where!"
Love and Marriage
Chapter 1
p.31
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
p.22
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger."Look!" she complained. "I hurt it." We all looked – the knuckle was black and blue. "You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to, but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a– "I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding." "Hulking," insisted Daisy.
p.24
She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute, and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's sing away–" Her voice sang: "It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?" "Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables."
p.26
"Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick is going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her." Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence. "Is she from New York?" I asked quickly. "From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Out beautiful white–" "Did you give Nick a little heart-to-heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know–""Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me.
Chapter 2
p.33
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let the barges through, the passengers on the waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomever he knew.
p.36
She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: "Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down." "Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.
Chapter 4
p.102
"’Gratulate me," [Daisy] muttered. "Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it." I was scared, I can tell you; I’d never seen a girl like that before. "Here, deares’." She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. "Take ‘em down-stairs and give ‘em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ‘em all Daisy’s change’ her mind. Say: ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’" She began to cry – she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her mother’s maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She wouldn’t let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.
p.103
I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily, and say: "Where’s Tom gone?" and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together – it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way.
p.106
"It was a strange coincidence," I said. "But it wasn’t a coincidence at all." "Why not?" "Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay."
p.107
"When I said you were a friend of Tom’s, he started to abandon the whole idea. He doesn’t know very much about Tom, though he says he’s read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy’s name."
Chapter 5
p.110
He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.
p.116
Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. "They’re such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the think folds. "It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before."
Chapter 7
p.155
He nodded sagely. "And what’s more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time." "You’re revolting," said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice, dropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: "Do you know why we left Chicago? I’m surprised that they didn’t treat you to the story of that little spree."
p.157
"You don’t understand," said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. "You’re not going to take care of her any more." "I’m not?" Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to control himself now. "Why’s that?" "Daisy’s leaving you." "Nonsense." "I am, though," she said with a visible effort."She’s not leaving me!" Tom’s words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. "Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger." "I won’t stand this!" cried Daisy. "Oh, please let’s get out."
p.168
The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had a bad moment there before I realized that so far his [Wilson’s] suspicions hadn’t alighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before – and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty – as if he had just got some poor girl with child.
p. 172
"Who wants to go to town?" demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby’s eyes floated toward her. "Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. "You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time ago.
p. 174
Daisy rose, smiling faintly, and went to the table."Open the whiskey, Tom," she ordered, "and I’ll make you a mint julep. Then you won’t seem so stupid to yourself […] Look at the mint!" "Wait a minute," snapped Tom, "I want to ask Mr. Gatsby one more question.""Go on," Gatsby said politely. "What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?" They were out in the open at last and Gatsby was content. "He isn’t causing a row." Daisy looked desperately from one to the other. "You’re causing a row. Please have a little self-control." "Self-control!" Repeated Tom incredulously. "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out […] Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white."Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization
p.181
Gatsby walked over and stood beside her. "Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once – but I loved you too." Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed. "You loved me TOO?" he repeated.
Wealth
Chapter 1
p.3
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since."Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had." He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments […]
p.10
His family were enormously wealthy – even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach – but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away; for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that. Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
p.12
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
p.16
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall
Chapter 3
p.53
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and he champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his motor-boats slid the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
p.59
"I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address – inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it." "Did you keep it?" asked Jordan. "Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars."
p.61
A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot. "What do you think?" he demanded impetuously. "About what?" He waved his hand toward the book-shelves. "About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They're real." "The books?" He nodded. "Absolutely real - have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages and - Here! Lemme show you." Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures." "See!" he cried triumphantly. "It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too - didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?" He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on the shelf, muttering if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse
Chapter 4
p.98
"Meyer Wolfsheim? No, he’s a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: "He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919." "Fixed the World’s Series?" I repeated. The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought if it all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. "How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute. "He just saw the opportunity."
Chapter 7
p.158
"I can’t say anything in his house, old sport." "She’s got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It’s full of –" I hesitated."Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood 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 […].
Memory and past
Chapter 4
p.101
"It was a strange coincidence," I said. "But it wasn’t a coincidence at all." "Why not?""Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay." Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.
Chapter 5
p.124
He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs. His bedroom was the simplest room of all – except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his eyes and began to laugh. "It’s the funniest thing, old sport," he said hilariously. "I can’t – When I try to –"He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an over-wound clock.
p.126
After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming-pool, and the hydroplane and the mid-summer flowers – but outside Gatsby’s window it began to rain again, so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound. "If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
Chapter 7
p.161
Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small, reluctant hand. Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before.
p.163
It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room. The voice begged again to go. "PLEASE, Tom! I can’t stand this any more." Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage, she had had, were definitely gone.
Chapter 8
p.202
No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock – until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about […] like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
p.208
"You ought to go away," I said. "It’s pretty certain they’ll trace your car." "Go away NOW, old sport?" "Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal." He wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free
p.212
"I don’t think she ever loved him." Gatsby turned around from a window and looked at me challengingly. "You must remember, old sport, she was very excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way that frightened her – that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper. And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying."He sat down gloomily. "Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were first married – and loved me more even then, do you see?" Suddenly he came out with a curious remark. "In any case," he said, "it was just personal." What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn’t be measured?
Chapter 9
p.236
[…] 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 – to-morrow 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.
Dissatisfaction
Chapter 1
p.20
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it – I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game
p.22
Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business
p.26
"That’s true." [Daisy] hesitated. "Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything." Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. "I suppose she talks, and – eats, and everything." "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said she was born. Would you like to hear?" "Very much." "It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about – things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’ "You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so – the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with a thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated – God, I’m sophisticated!"
Chapter 7
p. 170
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade. It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupe with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand. So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight
Chapter 8
p.206
He stayed there a week, walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car.
Chapter 9
p.219
Next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfsheim, which asked for information and urged him to come out on the next train. That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it. I was sure he’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure a there’d be a wire from Daisy before noon—but neither a wire nor Mr. Wolfsheim arrived; no one arrived except more police and photographers and newspaper men. When the butler brought back Wolfsheim’s answer I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all.
p.222
A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing, and I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did Gatsby’s father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister glanced several times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.
Religion
Chapter 2
p.46
"You see," cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. "It’s really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a Catholic, and they don't believe in divorce." Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie. "When they do get married," continued Catherine, "they're going West to live for a while until it blows over."
p.33
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic – their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
p.46
We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a gray, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track. "Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. "Awful." "It does her good to get away." "Doesn’t her husband object?" "Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so dumb he doesn't know he’s alive." So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York – or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train
Chapter 8
p.209
"Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you haven’t been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?" "Don’t belong to any." "You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must have gone to church once. Didn’t you get married in a church? Listen, George, listen to me. Didn’t you get married in a church?" "That was a long time ago."
p.212
"I spoke to her," he muttered, after a long silence. "I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window" – with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it – "and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’" Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night. "God sees everything," repeated Wilson. "That’s an advertisement," Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.
Isolation
Chapter 1
p.20
"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said she was born. Would you like to hear?" "Very much."It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about – things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’"
Chapter 3
p.70
The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.
p.72
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.
p.74
At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
Chapter 5
p.111
"Your place looks like the World’s Fair," I said. "Does it?" He turned his eyes toward it absently. "I have been glancing into some of the rooms. Let’s go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car." "It’s too late." "Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming-pool? I haven’t made use of it all summer." "I’ve got to go to bed." All right."
Chapter 8
p.210
He stayed there a week, walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car.
Chapter 9
p.219
Next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfsheim, which asked for information and urged him to come out on the next train. That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it. I was sure he’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure a there’d be a wire from Daisy before noon—but neither a wire nor Mr. Wolfsheim arrived; no one arrived except more police and photographers and newspaper men. When the butler brought back Wolfsheim’s answer I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all.
Mortality
Chapter 9
p.216
Most of those reports were a nightmare – grotesque, circumstantial, eager, and untrue. When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade – but Catherine, who might have said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount of character about it too – looked at the coroner with determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers, and swore that her sister had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it, and cried into her handkerchief, as if the very suggestion was more than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a man "deranged by grief." in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there.
p.230
About five o’clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate – first a motor hearse, horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and I in the limousine, and a little later four or five servants and the postman from West Egg in Gatsby’s station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground. I looked around. It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had found marveling over Gatsby’s books in the library one night three months before. I’d never seen him since then. I don’t know how he knew about the funeral, or even his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses, and he took them off and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolled from Gatsby’s grave. I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already too far away, and I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadn’t sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur, "Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on," and then the owl-eyed man said "Amen to that," in a brave voice. We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoke to me by the gate. "I couldn’t get to the house," he remarked. "Neither could anybody else." "Go on!" He started. "Why, my God! They used to go there by the hundreds." He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in "The poor son-of-a-bitch," he said.
p.239
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 – to-morrow 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.
p.234
"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he’s dead," he suggested. "After that my own rule is to let everything alone."
Chapter 7
p.155
"What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years?" "Don’t be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."
p.163
I stared at (Wilson) and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before—and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
p.177
Michaelis and this man reached her first, but when they had torn open her shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored for so long
Forgiveness
Chapter 9
p.235
"And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering – look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful –– " I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...
p. 237
"I wanted to get somebody for him. I wanted to go into the room where he lay and reassure him: "I’ll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don’t worry. Just trust me and I'll get somebody for you–"
p.223
"Of course you’ll be there yourself." "Well, I’ll certainly try. What I called up about is—" "Wait a minute," I interrupted. "How about saying you’ll come?" "Well, the fact is—the truth of the matter is that I’m staying with some people up here in Greenwich, and they rather expect me to be with them to-morrow. In fact, there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of course I’ll do my very best to get away." I ejaculated an unrestrained "Huh!" and he must have heard me, for he went on nervously: "What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if it’d be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You see, they’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them. My address is care of B. F. –" I didn’t hear the rest of the name, because I hung up the receiver.
p.225
We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoke to me by the gate. "I couldn't get to the house," he remarked. "Neither could anybody else." "Go on!" He started. "Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds." He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in. "The poor son-of-a-bitch," he said
p.238
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Gatsby’s portrait
James Gatz — that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career — when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of the bracing days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorbtion he took for granted.But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore. Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid sub-journalism of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores for five years when he turned up as James Gatz’s destiny at Little Girls Point.To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. I suppose he smiled at Cody — he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of them elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick and extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pair of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap. And when the Tuolomee left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left too.He was employed in a vague personal capacity — while he remained with Cody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about, and he provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five years, during which the boat went three times around the Continent. It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died. And it was from Cody that he inherited money — a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn’t get it. He never understood the legal device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man.
Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something. Do you notice what he's got about improving his mind? He was always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once and I beat him for it. This is a book he had when he was a boy. On the last fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE, and the date September 12th, 1906. And underneath: Rise from bed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.00 A.M.
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling . . . . . . 6.15-6.30 "Study electricity, etc . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.15-8.15 "
Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.30-4.30 P.M. Baseball and sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.30-5.00 "
Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00 "Study needed inventions . . . . . . . . . . . 7.00-9.00 " GENERAL RESOLVES
No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable];No more smokeing or chewing; Bath every other day; Read one improving book or magazine per week; Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week;Be better to parents.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament” – it was ea extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness.

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