[This 1925 novel is in nine chapters, and I decided to read three chapters at a time. I wrote about each three-chapter section before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
20 July 2025
Chapters 1-3
It’s a long time since I last read this novel, and Nick Carraway is a more important character in it than I remember. He’s more fully rounded than any of the others in these early chapters, presenting Gatsby’s story as a part of what seems to be a rite of passage of his own. After ‘boasting’—his word—about his own tolerance of other people’s behaviour since before he moved East from the Midwest, he lets us know that what he is going to describe is an experience that changed something in him. Gatsby ‘turned out all right at the end,’ but—and this is the crux of it—‘it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.’ It’s enough, he tells us, to have made him move back west.
After the two-page prologue, if that’s what it is, Gatsby hardly features either in this chapter or the next. Nick, before he meets him, is too deeply involved in making his own way In New York to show much interest in the man who owns the huge mansion next to his own little rented place. But our interest is piqued whenever Gatsby’s name does crop up, and what Fitzgerald presents us with is a masterclass in the teasing art of a particularly gradual introduction to a character. It’s so slow it seems motionless, because for the first two of these chapters, it’s all about Nick, and the rich couple he’s known since childhood.
Fitzgerald is playing a long game, and we get to know Daisy and Tom. They live on the fashionable promontory of East Egg, which Nick can see across the bay from his own place on the unfashionable West Egg. One time, at night, he notices Gatsby, his accidental neighbour, looking out across the stretch of water that separates the two Eggs. He thinks little of it. But the reader files it away for later, because nothing in this book happens by chance. It comes at the end of Chapter 1, after Nick’s visit to see Daisy and Tom Buchanan. Gatsby’s name had caught Daisy’s attention. Her friend, ‘Miss Baker’—we’ll get to know her too—is speaking, ‘contemptuously’ to Nick about West Egg:
‘I know somebody there.’
‘I don’t know a single—’
‘You must know Gatsby.’
‘Gatsby?’ demanded Daisy. ‘What Gatsby?’
But Fitzgerald draws a line under that by having dinner announced.
It’s only by a freak that Nick’s cheap rented place, ‘a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow,’ is the nearest house to Gatsby’s. ‘Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, [to] a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name.’ We hear this early on, when Nick is describing his first days on the East Coast. He has a job in finance in New York, and West Egg is a 20-mile train ride away, on Long Island. It’s another freak that Daisy and Tom live so close, and it’s typical of Fitzgerald that he’s set out the topography of class snobbery so carefully. He’s as attentive to the placement of his characters as Charles Dickens, and our first sight of Daisy at home is another master-class.
‘A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. / The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.’
It’s Daisy and Tom in a perfect nutshell. We’ve met Tom as he welcomes Nick outside, and we don’t like him. He’s a former athlete—‘I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game’—and there seems nothing to like. ‘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.’ Nick knew him there—did he hate his guts too?—and Tom’s closing of the doors does what we guess his heavy presence in a room always does.
Daisy, meanwhile, and perhaps her friend too, are made of air. The way she and Nick talk to one another is witty, light, empty of any significance. ‘I’m p-paralysed with happiness,’ she tells him, and he is a master of this tone too. When she asks if people in Chicago miss her, he doesn’t miss a beat. ‘The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.’ When, in the same tone, she says to Tom they must go straight back tomorrow, he ignores her. She ignores herself, because, ‘irreverently,’ she changes the subject. She tells Nick, ‘You ought to see the baby.’ The little girl is three, in fact.
Enough of Chapter 1? Not at all, because it’s full of darkness as a beautiful sunset shades into night. There’s something terribly transient in the beauty of the golden light before it fades. Before this, Tom has had to answer the phone, and Daisy’s friend tells Nick it will be Tom’s mistress. Daisy, unhappy and maudlin in her drink, tells him about the birth of their child. Tom had disappeared before Daisy was fully awake to discover she’d had a baby girl. ‘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.’ All of which tells us everything we need to know about Daisy and Tom—except for his fabulous inherited wealth.
Meanwhile, the spotless whiteness of Daisy’s friend is only superficial, it seems. She’s a well-known golfer—‘Oh,’ says Nick when he’s properly introduced, ‘Jordan Baker’—and he tries to remember some scandal about her. What was it about…? Meanwhile, her conversation, when she can be moved from her pose of statuesque indifference to all around her, seems to be mostly about the scandal of other people’s lives. She always knows all the gossip. Small things, but they’ll be there for a reason.
I’ve already mentioned that glimpse Nick gets of Gatsby looking—and stretching his arms—towards a ‘green light’ on East Egg, and we wonder what it’s about. But it brings Chapter 1 to a neat close—making it, like all these early chapters, into an almost standalone set piece. If Chapter 1 is about different facets of privilege, including its dark sides—dark for everybody, that is, including the rich themselves—Chapter 2 is about a much more blatant form of squalor. This is the underclass, the poor who are routinely exploited by men like Tom Buchanan. With the memory of the expensive, sparkling airiness of East Egg still fresh in the reader’s mind, Fitzgerald gives us this: ‘About halfway between West Egg and New York … is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.’ I told you it was blatant.
And Fitzgerald hasn’t finished. He gives us a stand-out image that hangs above the rest: ‘The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas 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.’ They are what is left of an old advertising gimmick, and now they ‘brood on over the solemn dumping ground.’ I wonder how many essays have been written about those eyes. I won’t even try.
Tom is on the train to the city with Nick but makes them stop off at a garage here. He’s pretending to do some business with the owner, Wilson, and Fitzgerald has him threatening to take his business elsewhere if Wilson doesn’t kow-tow low enough… but really he’s picking up Myrtle, the wife. She is the opposite of Daisy in every way, heavy and no beauty. But she has a vivacious spirit, and obviously plenty else Tom likes to get his hands on, and she leaves with them to get the train. And what comes in the rest of the chapter is a hymn to the other side of Tom Buchanan. Except it’s really a confirmation of his real character.
Highlights. Their arrival in New York, and Myrtle insisting Tom buys her an overpriced mongrel puppy. Tom pays, and is cynical and resentful about it. The apartment Tom is paying for, full of dark, oversized furniture. Myrtle’s sister Catherine is thereshe’s always the pretext for these visits to New Yorkand so are the married neighbours, loud (her) and downtrodden (him). Tom ignores the man’s attempts to get him to commission a photograph of his house. There’s drink, music, Myrtle and Tom’s temporary disappearance into the bedroom… and Myrtle’s complaint about Daisy that, being a Catholic, she is refusing to let him divorce her. Nick is, ‘a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.’ But the real stand-out moment is what ends the sordid little party.
‘Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.
“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai—”
Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.’
You get the picture.
Chapter 3 is even more of a standalone episode. Fitzgerald has Nick describe one of Gatsby’s famous weekend parties, the reason why Jordan Baker and everybody else (except Daisy, it seems) knows about him. ‘There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.’ No expense is spared—which is where any possible similarities with Tom and Daisy’s lifestyle end. The Buchanans’ is the easy, unthinking style of people who have always known it. Gatsby’s is about money, and putting on a good show. People arrive from miles around, with or without invitations, and it’s one long riot. And, finally, Nick gets to meet his neighbour. The meeting is a part of that masterclass on the gradual introduction I mentioned—Fitzgerald works it so that Gatsby has to introduce himself.
Highlights? There are almost too many, because this party, typical of all of them, is one long highlight. There’s food: ‘buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.’ There’s an orchestra, ‘no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums.’ There are enough coloured lights to make a ‘Christmas tree’ of Gatsby’s garden. And there are people, mostly in groups, including swimmers. Nick meets a range of them with Jordan, who talks to ‘two girls in twin yellow dresses,’ later with ‘three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble’—a throwaway line that says it all. It’s no surprise when ‘a pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls.’
It’s all like this, and Nick wonders why he hasn’t met Gatsby yet. All he has heard are rumours about him. ‘I heard he killed a man once’ or ‘I heard he was a German spy.’ Whatever, he is at a table with Jordan and ‘a man about my age and a rowdy little girl.’ By now he has drunk so much that ‘the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.’ Well, maybe—but the man smiles and tells him, ‘politely,’ that his face seems familiar. A moment later he is inviting Nick to come for a ride in his flying boat the next morning, and is about to ask him his name, but the moment passes, and he carries on talking to the man…. Have you guessed yet?
‘“This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there—” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”
For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.
“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.
“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”
“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”’
Perfect. And, sure, there’s an owl-eyed man in glasses in the library, astonished that the books are real—later, the same man is the passenger in a car whose wheel has been sheared off after veering off into a ditch, the driver comically unaware of what’s just happened… but the lasting impression is of the sheer randomness of it. The trajectory of the party is, , almost identical to the one in the New York apartment, aside from Tom’s assault on Myrtle. People get drunker, louder, and jealously argumentative. As a man propositions a young actress, his wife ‘appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed: “You promised!” into his ear.’ And whereas Myrtle’s party ends with Nick waking up in the small hours, to find himself surrounded by the would-be photographer’s sad portfolio, this one ends with Gatsby. ‘A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.’
But this is Nick’s own story too. Writing about what we have been reading so far he tells us, ‘they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.’ One of which is Jordan Baker, introduced so ambiguously in Chapter 1. He hears a story about her lying to save face—which is when he remembers the near-scandal still clinging to her name. She was once accused of moving her own ball in a vital match. Only after her opponent’s caddy is persuaded to retract his story can she carry on with her career. And he comes to learn that the woman for whom he has definitively ended a half-defined romance ‘back home’ is a serial liar.
He is very understanding, because he thinks he might be in love with her, but ‘I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.’ Ah, her body. Yes. But will the relationship last? We might guess from his bruised tone at the start of the novel—all that high talk of ‘foul dust’ he’s leaving behind—that she might have something to do with it.
Chapters 4-6
Standalone chapters? Yes, but within a grand scheme, I think. I remember from other times I’ve read this book that the whole plot pivots exactly at the half-way point. Nick discovers how carefully Gatsby has planned his attempt at a casual meeting with Daisy, and he gives us enough of the back-story to let us in on how it fits into an astonishing tale of self-reinvention. Gatsby doesn’t tell him at first, instead keeping up the pretence of his wealthy family all dying off and leaving him rich. Nick is sceptical about the story even as he listens in the car, in Chapter 4. This is the chapter in which Gatsby wants Nick to ignore all the rumours about him, and to understand the truth. His attempt doesn’t work on him at all, and Nick tells us about Gatsby’s real history in Chapter 6…
…but that’s later. In fact, Chapter 4 opens with a morning-after post mortem of the party that just happened: ‘the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn,’ exchanging more rumours about Gatsby. ‘He’s a bootlegger…. One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.’ There is a lot of name-dropping, and Nick gives us paragraphs of real-sounding and made-up-sounding names, catalogued by district. So from unfashionable West Egg, among others, are ‘the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly….’ Oh, and there’s Klipspringer who never leaves, but becomes a permanent house-guest. Yep. How does Fitzgerald give us the impression that there’s nothing to see here? Nothing matters.
Now comes more of the expensive glamour. Gatsby’s car is ‘a rich cream colour, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and toolboxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns….’ One sun is definitely not enough. The drive to New York is full of heady impressions. ‘A dead man passed us in a hearse,’ but so does a limousine ‘driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.’ Wealth and status-markers? Definitely, to go with what Gatsby has been telling Nick on the way.
The story starts badly: ‘Look here, old sport … what’s your opinion of me, anyhow?’ Nick doesn’t know what to say, but then Gatsby, determined to overcome his own hesitancy, launches on a tale of wealth, lost love, and his own heroism. It’s hard for Nick to keep a straight face. ‘I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.’ But, just occasionally, Gatsby confirms some detail. The medal from ‘little Montenegro?’ Here it is. His claim to have been ‘educated at Oxford,’ a phrase no genuine Oxford man would ever use? Confirmed by a photograph of him in a group of blazered college men before an arched gate, the famous spires in the background.
‘Then it was all true.’ Really? The tone of the next sentence denies it. ‘I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.’ Then it turns out that the lunch invitation is a pretext—he wanted Nick to understand he wasn’t just some ‘nobody,’ because he’s going to ask a favour of him. ‘Miss Baker has kindly consented to speak to you about this matter.’ Nothing ‘underhand,’ of course, heaven forbid, but Gatsby knows Nick is seeing Jordan for tea. By the time they are approaching New York, Nick is genuinely annoyed.
At the restaurant, he meets Wolfshiem. It seems Gatsby knows exactly how not to impress anybody. Wolfsheim oozes seedy cunning, always seeking new business ‘gonnegtions,’ and Gatsby blandly describes him as a gambler. He’s the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, he says—and I always think of this as the moment where Nick really understands Gatsby’s moral emptiness. It doesn’t help that while Gatsby is taking a long-distance call, Wolfshiem sings his praises. Not only is he ‘an Oggsford man,’ he looks the part: “There’s the kind of man you’d like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister.”’ We realise that Gatsby is the perfect front-man for Wolfshiem’s business…. And there’s a little coda. When Tom Buchanan arrives at the restaurant, Nick speaks to him—but when he turns back to Gatsby, he’s no longer there. Why might that be?
We soon find out, because Jordan fills in the back-story. Daisy, the popular rich girl in Louisville, meets a young officer. Soon, they are both besotted—but he has to leave to fight. Daisy’s family prevents her from seeing Gatsby off in New York, but it’s serious, and promises are made on both sides. For months, Daisy makes no serious effort to see other men. But time passes, and ‘by the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a début after the armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago.’ Do we find out all we need to know about Daisy in those three sentences? On the night before the wedding she is ready to call it off, as she clutches a crumpled, disintegrated letter… but she marries Tom anyway, and soon he is involved in a car accident, with a hotel chambermaid in the passenger seat.
And that was it, until Jordan mentions his name in Chapter 1, six weeks ago. Jordan has found out his side of the story from him.
‘“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 splendour.
“He wants to know,” continued Jordan, “if you’ll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.”’
Of course he will. But meanwhile, Nick tries to live his own life. ‘Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.’ Jordan will just have to do.
I’ve already called Chapter 5 the pivot-point. Now that Gatsby knows that Nick has said yes, he tries to prepare. Every light is on in his house—‘your place looks like the World’s Fair’—as he reassures himself of its impressiveness. There are absurd moments, like when he sends over his man to mow Nick’s lawn, then sends a ‘greenhouse’ of flowers. Gatsby’s little subterfuges are farcical, as when Nick, leaving Gatsby alone as he goes to open the door for Daisy, discovers he has left through the back door. He wants to keep up the pretence that he’s simply dropped by, and it fools nobody. Things become so awkward—‘This is a terrible mistake,’ Gatsby tells him—that Nick goes out for a walk in the rain.
And, while Nick is looking at Gatsby’s house and musing on the hubris of the original owner—he is outside for a page or so in the exact middle of this middle chapter—something is happening in his own house. ‘Daisy’s face was smeared with tears …. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed….’ They prepare to go to Gatsby’s house, and when Gatsby remarks to Nick how well it looks in the sunlight now that the rain has stopped, he agrees it looks splendid. And as Daisy is taken around the house, Gatsby keenly attuned to how well she likes it, it’s clear she’s dazzled. As Gatsby brings out the contents of his wardrobe, we get one of the novel’s most memorable lines. ‘Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. “They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”’ Nobody can match Fitzgerald for the throwaway line that says it all.
Nick is about to leave them, but his attention is caught. ‘I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.’ We’re getting used to this epic tone by now. This isn’t the dream of some two-bit charlatan who got lucky, and Daisy isn’t just some conventional old flame. ‘I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.’ Objectively, these are ordinary, fallible people. But for Nick, for some reason, the dream’s the thing…
…and in Chapter 6 he not only runs with it, but expands it into a cosmic, other-worldly vision. It’s only later that Gatsby tells him the full story, ‘but I’ve put it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumours about his antecedents, which weren’t even faintly true….‘ What Nick does first is describe the slow burn of Gatsby’s ambition and self-reinvention long before he even met Daisy. At the age of seventeen, he ingratiates himself with a self-made Texan sailing his yacht, and slowly hones his newly-created identity. He had already practised calling himself Jay Gatsby rather than Jimmy Gatz and now presents himself as an easy-living upper-class type. He moves seamlessly, when the time comes, into training as an officer in the army.
‘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.’ This all comes at the beginning of the chapter, but now we come to its main subject, the catastrophic collision of two worlds. The catastrophe hasn’t happened yet, but we can be sure it will.
Some weeks pass before Nick goes round to Gatsby’s house one Sunday. Tom Buchanan arrives on horseback with some friends, and he is obviously there to sniff out who Gatsby is. ‘“I’m delighted to see you,” said Gatsby, standing on his porch. “I’m delighted that you dropped in.” / As though they cared!’ There’s a complete mismatch of expectations. Gatsby is clueless about upper-class etiquette. He mistakes a polite remark, that he might join them at one of the friends’ places, for a real invitation. He doesn’t have a horse, but will follow in his glittering car—except the others leave while he’s getting his coat.
But this is minor stuff. The real collision comes when Gatsby invites Daisy to one of his parties, and Tom comes too. Everything about it is wrong, and the single positive remark Daisy makes is about a starlet, in the company of a film producer. ‘I like her…. She’s lovely.’ And now Fitzgerald has Nick extemporise not on her revulsion at the vulgarity, but something far deeper within her: ‘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 vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a shortcut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.’ She doesn’t get it, Gatsby’s world, any more than he gets hers.
With Tom, it isn’t just about incomprehension. He doesn’t like Gatsby and the people he mixes with, and he warns Daisy. ‘I’d like to know who he is and what he does…. And I think I’ll make a point of finding out.’ She, of course, wants to protect him. ‘I can tell you right now…. He owned some drugstores, a lot of drugstores. He built them up himself.’ Tom doesn’t believe a word of it. Who would?
Gatsby is depressed after she has left. ‘“She didn’t like it.” He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house—just as if it were five years ago.’ Nick tries to remonstrate with him, warning him that you can’t repeat the past. ‘“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”’ By this time, based on what he learns now and in later conversations, Nick has become the interpreter of Gatsby’s dreams. It’s an extraordinary story as he tells it—and I’m interested that Fitzgerald has made it Nick’s story to tell.
He goes back to the story of the short-lived affair and its aftermath. ‘His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was… / … One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling…. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above 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.’
Whose voice is this? Certainly not Gatsby’s. There’s no Daisy in Nick’s own life, as we know—‘I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs’—and perhaps it’s his romantic vision of a love he has never felt. Since the beginning, this has been his story as much as Gatsby’s, and in the last paragraph of the chapter he forces us to see this. He will never have what Gatsby had. ‘Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.’
Chapters 7-9—to the end
These final three chapters are extraordinary in more ways than I can count. I’ll start with the way Fitzgerald has Nick give a forensically precise account of how Gatsby’s dream comes to an end. An airless parlour in a New York hotel becomes the setting for the most toe-curlingly awkward—and most harrowingly believable—scene in the novel. Gatsby’s blind faith in his vision crashes into the reality of Tom’s own outraged sense of the insult he’s been dealt.
On a whim, on the last, hottest day of the summer, they have driven to New York. Hoping to find somewhere cool, they have rented an airless sitting room in a hotel, and this is where the awful scene takes place. Tom finally realises what’s been going on under his nose, and is definitely not about to follow the latest fashion of letting ‘Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.’ In the four or five pages that follow, Fitzgerald gives us yet another masterclass, this time in presenting in real time the way the upper classes simply tear to shreds any other truth but their own…. Or maybe they simply render any other truth irrelevant. Gatsby has no ‘traditions’—Tom means old money—and, although he doesn’t realise it yet, he has nothing else left at the end either.. It isn’t because Tom wins any arguments, but because Daisy is more comfortable with his truth than Gatsby’s. Sure, a few weeks of carefree afternoons with an old flame have taken her mind off her unhappy marriage to a bore. But at least he’s her bore, and not a crook.
At first Gatsby, full of confidence, is sure he has the upper hand. Whenever Tom is out of the room after lunch at the Buchanans’, Daisy has been having a great time showing Gatsby how much she loves him. Should alarm bells have been ringing, for the reader at least? Those full-on kisses, those whispered I love yous, well within the hearing of Nick and Jordan… for the moment, she believed it all. And she finds the strength, when Gatsby forces the issue in the hotel, to tell Tom she can’t possibly love him. But Tom, realising he’s fighting for his marriage, has the confidence of a man who has spent his life being on the winning side.
He scornfully tells the others he’s been looking into Gatsby’s ‘business.’ The specific details he spits at him are clearly true, because not only does Gatsby not deny them, he makes things worse. His only defence is to remind Tom that somebody from his own circle joined in one of their schemes, a barb that Tom sneeringly returns—‘God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject of you’—so that Gatsby, with none of Tom’s lifelong self-certainty behind him, crumbles before all their eyes. His composure in shreds, and with Daisy forced to look on, he is reduced to ‘denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself….’
Because she has crumbled too, and it’s over. Having gone along with Gatsby’s careful coaching, confirming that she had never loved Tom, suddenly she can’t pretend any more. ‘“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 is appalled. ‘You loved me too?’ He can’t believe it—and Tom senses victory. ‘Even that’s a lie,’ he says savagely—Fitzgerald’s word—and carries on detailing his own life with Daisy while she didn’t even know Gatsby was alive. ‘The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby….’ I bet they did. Daisy, it seems, really is a creature of air. The man she looks to for a sense of certainty is Tom, and she seeks comfort from him now. He’s won. And now Fitzgerald can get on with the smooth unfolding of the rest of the plot.
Ah yes, the plot. It’s the second extraordinary aspect of Chapters 7 and 8, as Fitzgerald makes everything appear to be the natural culmination of the previous chapters. But it’s meticulously orchestrated. Near the beginning of the chapter Daisy, who has been seeing Gatsby for weeks, he later tells Nick, has invited both of them over. Tom is there, and so is Jordan. The heat is oppressive, the atmosphere is somehow overripe—Jordan’s word, as it happens—and only Daisy and Gatsby are having a good time. Except Daisy is too hot…
…so she suggests they go to New York. OK. In a dreadful pretence of playfulness, she is to go with Gatsby in Tom’s car while he drives Gatsby’s ‘circus-wagon’ with Nick and Jordan. Gatsby’s car is nearly out of gas, so Tom stops at Wilson’s place to fill up. While Tom talks to Wilson about the car he might or might not sell him, Nick’s attention is caught, not only by the eyes of Dr TJ Eckleberg, but by another pair, Myrtle Wilson’s, taking in the whole scene from an upstairs window. File that away for later, if you haven’t already.
Daisy, when they all finally meet up, continues with her trademark throwaway banter. First she suggests she’ll go driving with Gatsby, telling the others to look out for her as ‘the man smoking two cigarettes,’ then she’s suggesting they rent five bathrooms to take cold baths. It’s her way of keeping disengaged while remaining likeable and fun—and there’s plenty for her to disengage from in this chapter. But in fact they rent that dreadful hotel room—and suddenly, they hear ‘the portentous chords of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March’ from the ballroom below.’
How many portents do you need? From the sudden end to Gatsby’s parties, to the arrival of his insolent new staff, friends of Wolfshiem’s, to Tom’s continued boorishness, to the oppressive heat, to the awkward home truths at Wilson’s garage to… all the rest. After the terrible scene, Gatsby is so shocked he looks at Tom ‘—and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden—as if he had killed a man. For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that fantastic way.’ Tom is preening himself over his victory and makes a show of taking charge. He tells Daisy she’s fine to drive home with Gatsby, in his own flashy car this time—got that?—because he won’t be bothering her any more. He follows in his own car with Nick and Jordan, and there’s the darkest portent of all: ‘So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.’
The first notice we get of an actual death comes in the next sentence, following a line break. ‘The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the ash-heaps was the principal witness at the inquest.’ His memory is of seeing George during the afternoon, with Myrtle locked upstairs. He’s going to take her back west, because he’s discovered she’s been having an affair. (We know from earlier that he doesn’t suspect Tom.) Later, when Michaelis looks over to the garage, there’s a ‘tremendous row,’ going on, then ‘she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting—before he could move from his door the business was over.’ He and another man run to the body, and find her bloodied and dead. We’re not hearing Michaelis’s voice now: ‘The mouth was wide open and ripped a little at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.’
Cut, movie-like, to Tom’s car as they all see stopped vehicles and a gathering crowd near Wilson’s garage. Tom stops, and they discover Myrtle has been killed in the way we know about. (I don’t think Nick ever writes it, but she must have assumed Tom was in the big car, having seen him driving in it earlier.) By the time they leave, it’s pretty certain it was Gatsby’s car, and that the driver made no attempt to stop. On the drive back to East Egg, Tom sobs. ‘The God damned coward! He didn’t even stop his car.’ Even Nick has given up on him by now, because when he talks to Gatsby waiting wretchedly outside the Buchanans’ house later, he seems only to care about Daisy’s welfare and that there seemed to be no witnesses. ‘I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to tell him he was wrong.’ And then—have you guessed?—Gatsby lets slip that Daisy was driving. But ‘of course I’ll say I was’—and Nick’s faith in him, of course, is completely restored. Nick had seen earlier that Tom and Daisy are piecing their marriage back together, and he leaves Gatsby ‘standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.’
What happens next day is straightforward, but the telling of it isn’t. More than half the chapter is taken up with Nick’s day, starting with the night and morning when Gatsby tells him the long story about Dan Cody, meeting Daisy, the war—and how she slipped through his fingers. Nick goes to work, having called out to Gatsby that he’s ‘better than the whole rotten lot of them.’ He is tired out and restless in the office, can’t face seeing Jordan when she calls, and he plans to catch the 3.50 train home. Gatsby’s desperation and unhappiness is preying on his mind, but he doesn’t give any reasons for his unease.
Fitzgerald has been fracturing the chronology all along, but now he has Nick help us out just once. ‘I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before.…’ The ever-faithful Michaelis stays through the night with the moaning, muttering Wilson. Some time around three a.m., Wilson starts to focus on ‘the yellow car’ and, eventually, realises Myrtle must have been rushing out to flag down the driver. ‘She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn’t stop.’ By now, he’s decided the driver must be the same man who gave her a bloody nose earlier in the summer, and who had given her the expensive dog leash he’s found. ‘He murdered her!’ Tom has already explained that the car he had been driving into New York earlier belonged to a friend of his, and now Wilson says he has ‘a way of finding out’ who it belongs to.
Sure enough, Wilson disappears early in the morning, on foot. The police only have a few witness reports of a ‘crazy’-looking many making his way east. They have no idea how, by 2.30, ‘he was in West Egg, where he asked someone the way to Gatsby’s house. So by that time he knew Gatsby’s name….’ This is running parallel to Nick’s account of his exhausted day at work—and in the last short section of the chapter we get another parallel timeline. ‘At two o’clock Gatsby put on his bathing-suit and left word with the butler that if anyone phoned, word was to be brought to him at the pool.’ And as these three paths begin to converge, Nick gives us his version of what might have been going through Gatsby’s mind. Nick isn’t an omniscient narrator, but sometimes he seems to think he is:
‘I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe [a call] 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.’
When Nick arrives, shots had been ignored by Gatsby’s street-hardened staff, and they go with him to make the fateful discovery: ‘the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water. / It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.’ It’s an ending. The clockwork has wound down, the inevitable end has come. Gatsby has paid for a crime perpetrated by his rich, other-worldly fantasy lover while attempting to cover for her.
But it’s only the first ending, and not necessarily the most important. The injustice of the murder, and Nick’s repeated claims for the momentousness of Gatsby’s vision—and the way it has turned to ashes—have made him a tragic figure. But can a true tragedy be brought about by a series of unhappy accidents? In fact, Fitzgerald wants us to believe in a more profound inevitability than a death coming about through a series of unlucky accidents. So he gives us Chapter 9.
Fitzgerald, now completely confident in everything he’s been doing in this novel, brings it to the most elegant close imaginable. The final sentence is so famous it’s become a cliché, but that line about beating on against the current explains the whole project perfectly. It wasn’t Gatsby who was wrong, but the world. He’d decided he had experienced perfection, and Nick, the ever-forgiving Nick, is only going to applaud him for his unwavering determination to recreate it. But, having witnessed what the world has done to Gatsby and his dream, he can do nothing but turn away from it. Before the end of the year, he’s gone back west to what he knows. It’s his way, completely different from Gatsby’s, of being ‘borne back ceaselessly to the past.’
From the first sentence, it’s clear this chapter is a return to what Nick told us at the beginning. ‘After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day….’ His ruminations on what he has learnt from his strange summer not only book-end the novel, but appear throughout it. But most of the chapter is given over to Nick’s growing dismay that Gatsby has nobody in New York who cares enough to attend his funeral—and he doesn’t stop projecting a vivid internal life for Gatsby even after his death. As officials uncover his face, Gatsby seems to speak to him. ‘Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone.’ And Nick dedicates the next days to just that. He tries Gatsby’s phone-book, forlornly empty of the names of any friends. He would contact anybody he remembers from the parties, but has no details. He writes to Wolfshiem, expecting he will come straight out to West Egg. ‘I was sure he’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure there’d be a wire from Daisy before noon….’ Hah.
He never does hear from Daisy, but Wolfshiem writes. From the first line—‘This has been one of the most terrible shocks of my life to me I hardly can believe it that it is true at all’—to the last—‘I hardly know where I am when I hear about a thing like this and am completely knocked down and out’—Fitzgerald fills it with semi-literate, sentimental cliches that Nick doesn’t feel the need to comment on. When he practically forces his way into Wolfshiem’s office to shame him into coming, it’s no use. But this time, there are a couple of phrases that hook themselves into the memory. ‘I saw right away he was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told me he was at Oggsford I knew I could use him good.’ You bet. Then, ‘Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead’—which sums up exactly what Nick is discovering about everybody Gatsby ever knew. Except for the part about them ever being his friends, alive or dead.
But then, of course, Gatsby’s father arrives. His impressed, starry-eyed vision of ‘Jimmy’s’ achievements is as naïve as Gatsby’s own expectation that he would be able to impress Daisy and her world. It doesn’t matter whether we might think he ever had a chance or not, because Fitzgerald’s careful plot manoeuvres have rendered the question irrelevant. He tried, and—what can you say? He died in the attempt. But Henry C Gatz knows nothing of that. All he knows is that a madman killed his Jimmy, who had ‘a great future in front of him.’ And from previous readings, I’ve always remembered one of his pieces of evidence—his son’s ‘Schedule’ when he was a boy. We’ve all made lists like that—sadly, some of us still do—but here’s all the proof Mr Gatz needs. ‘It just shows you, don’t it? … Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something.’
And nobody does come. Not Daisy, now travelling with Tom and leaving no forwarding address, not Wolfshiem, not Klipspringer the hanger-on, who only phones about a pair of missing shoes. But there, by the grave, is the man in owl-eyed glasses. When Nick tells him nobody else is there except staff, he is shocked. ‘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.’ What does he see that nobody else does? And what is it about seeing eyes in this novel? Discuss. Or, now I think about it, doesn’t Owl-eyes see the culture of wealth perfectly in that earlier scene? He’s impressed that Gatsby has bought a real library—and just as impressed that the uncut pages show that the books have not been bought to be read. So much for that resolution in Jimmy Gatz’s schedule: ‘Read one improving book or magazine per week….’
The only other one who sees, of course, is Nick. But he always sees what he wants to see. To the end, he chooses to present the persona he has created for Gatsby, the romantic visionary who falls victim to the foulness of other people. Wolfshiem is the obvious Svengali figure, but Dan Cody had started it, making use of this attractive young man as an accessory to divert attention from his own bullying reputation. And then there’s Tom, the poster-boy of upper-class hypocrisy, whose moralising tone in the hotel room almost make Nick laugh out loud. ‘The transition from libertine to prig was so complete—and he cravenly pleads self-defence when admitting he named Gatsby as the driver of the car that killed his mistress. ‘You’re better than the whole lot of them!’ Nick is proud to recall being the last thing he called out to Gatsby just before the murder. But is he, really?
What helps to make Nick’s relationship with Gatsby so complicated is its ambiguity. He admires and envies Gatsby, whilst labelling him a ‘Trimalchio,’ whose ‘lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption.’ Even that reference to corruption is ambiguous: the people’s guesses are uninformed, and after all the revelations about him, including his role as Wolfshiem’s front-man, Nick still focuses on Gatsby’s ‘incorruptible dream.’ Of course, the reader can see how thoroughly Gatsby is criminally compromised by his ambition to create the wealthy persona he thinks Daisy needs to see. Fitzgerald makes it his mission his narrator almost unhesitatingly express his admiration.
But it isn’t only Gatsby that Nick is presenting to us. In the final chapter especially, he wants to be as revealing as he can about himself. There’s nothing self-admiring in the way he writes about his own dogged determination to find mourners for Gatsby. This is just how he is, and he goes some way towards explaining how his own ordinary, comfortably middle-class background has helped to make him that way. He takes us back to his returns home from school, especially at Christmas, to a world of cosy certainties, ‘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 complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.’
It’s the same decency, the kind that he regrets now seems rather quaint, that makes him see Jordan before leaving New York—‘an awkward, unpleasant thing that perhaps had better have been let alone.’ She is still bruised by his choosing not to see her on that exhausted afternoon as he frets about Gatsby. She doesn’t understand that she is a part of what he no longer trusts in the East, instead choosing to blame him. ‘I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.’ He doesn’t even try to defend himself. ‘I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.’ She doesn’t answer. ‘Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.’
He also meets Tom accidentally in the street and, eventually, realises that in telling Wilson where to find Gatsby ‘I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused.’ It’s another confirmation of how things work in the Buchanan world, and leads to another of those life-lessons that have contributed to Nick’s weariness with it. ‘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….’ It’s another of the novel’s unforgettable lines.
So, is this novel as good as I remember? Yes. Is it the best novel of the 20th Century? Within its niche—white America from a male point of view—it’s up there. I love the complexity of Nick’s relationship with Gatsby, and how it’s possible to argue that Gatsby’s main role is to be a catalyst for Nick’s own self-examination. They only have a tiny handful of conversations, but they change Nick’s entire world-view, and force him to come to terms with a perceived deficiency in himself that he’s still mulling over, two years after Gatsby’s death. It accounts for the bitterness of those opening pages as he starts to look back, and it accounts for the disgust he feels for a cynical, self-serving world. They all took Gatsby and were quick to ‘use him good.’ At the end, there’s nothing Nick can do but leave them all behind.
We can read it for you wholesale 