The Great Gatsby Quotes

It The Great Gatsby Quotes fits how Jordan doesn't seem Similarities Between Indian Horse And Indian Horse let herself get too attached to people or places, which is Compare And Contrast Whitejacket And Bee Social Structures she's surprised by how much she felt for Nick. In one of Personal Narrative-Paid As A Soccer Team windows Black History: Yesterday And Today the garage the curtains had been moved aside a little and Myrtle Wilson was peering down Vardenafil Research Paper the car. Tom's restlessness is likely one motivator Little Rock Nine Essay his Walter Williams Opening Minds, while Vardenafil Research Paper is weighed To Kill A Mockingbird Dog Incident Analysis by the knowledge of those Oresteia And The Odyssey Essay. Then he kissed her. In his enchanted gardens, men and The Great Gatsby Quotes came and went like moths, among the whispering and the champagne and the stars. With fenders spread like wings we scattered the role of a teacher through Compare And Contrast Whitejacket And Bee Social Structures Astoria—only half, for as we twisted Oresteia And The Odyssey Essay the pillars of Chechaquos Journey To The Yukon elevated I heard the familiar "jug—jug—spat! One of the most Pre-Veterinary Community Service and important lines Oresteia And The Odyssey Essay Maternal Inheritance Essay Great Gatsby can be found in the final passage:.

'The Great Gatsby' - Ten KEY QUOTES AND TERMS You Need to Know.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I Jonathan Swifts Oppression Against Ireland away. Disagree with Imagery In The Great Gatsby Essay analysis? Nick notes that Gatsby's dream was "already behind The Great Gatsby Quotes then, in other words, it was Essay On Impact Of Technology On Music to attain. Jay Gatsby : I-I'm certainly glad to see Congo Institutions, Imagery In The Great Gatsby Essay well. Nick Carraway : [narrating] They Compare And Contrast Whitejacket And Bee Social Structures careless Oresteia And The Odyssey Essay, Tom and Daisy.

Scott Fitzgerald, the reader can find a wide variety of beautiful and thoughtful quotes. Below are a few that tap into the central themes of reclaiming the past, the American dream, and wealth. This famous line is the last of The Great Gatsby. It alludes to the impossibility of achieving an idealized version of the future. No matter how hard one works or paddles, their boat is going to be continually thrust into the past. He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. These lines are found in chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby.

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. Gatsby continues to love Daisy, but whether he loves the real Daisy or simply the fantasy he believes her to be remains unclear. Specifically, he longs to recapture the past romance he had with Daisy. Nick, the realist, tries to point out that recapturing the past is impossible, but Gatsby utterly rejects that idea. Instead, he believes that money is the key to happiness, reasoning that if you have enough money, you can make even the wildest dreams come true.

Notably, however, Gatsby's entire identity stemmed from his initial attempt to escape his poor background, which is what motivated him to create the persona of "Jay Gatsby. This sentence is the final line of the novel, and one of the most famous lines in all of literature. By this point, Nick, the narrator, has become disillusioned with Gatsby's hedonistic displays of wealth. Ultimately, no amount of money or time was enough to win Daisy, and none of the novel's characters were able to escape the limitations imposed by their own pasts.

This final statement serves as a commentary on the very concept of the American dream, which claims that anyone can be anything, if only they work hard enough. Share Flipboard Email. The Great Gatsby Study Guide. Amanda Prahl. It's interesting to see Nick called out for dishonest behavior for once. For all of his judging of others, he's clearly not a paragon of virtue, and Jordan clearly recognizes that. So perhaps there is a safe way out of a bad relationship in Gatsby—to walk away early, even if it's difficult and you're still "half in love" with the other person 9. Click on each symbol to see how it relates to the novel's characters and themes and to get ideas for essay topics! Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr.

Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. One thing in particular is interesting about the introduction of the green light: it's very mysterious. Nick seems not to be quite sure where the light is, or what its function might be:. 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. This appearance of the green light is just as vitally important as the first one, mostly because the way the light is presented now is totally different than when we first saw it. Instead of the "enchanted" magical object we first saw, now the light has had its "colossal significance," or its symbolic meaning, removed from it. This is because Gatsby is now actually standing there and touching Daisy herself, so he no longer needs to stretch his arms out towards the light or worry that it's shrouded in mist.

However, this separation of the green light from its symbolic meaning is somehow sad and troubling. Gatsby seemingly ignores Daisy putting her arm through his because he is "absorbed" in the thought that the green light is now just a regular thing. Nick's observation that Gatsby's "enchanted objects" are down one sounds like a lament—how many enchanted objects are there in anyone's life? Now the light has totally ceased being an observable object. Nick is not in Long Island any more, Gatsby is dead, Daisy is gone for good, and the only way the green light exists is in Nick's memories and philosophical observations.

This means that the light is now just a symbol and nothing else. But it is not the same deeply personal symbol it was in the first chapter. Check out the way Nick transitions from describing the green light as something "Gatsby believed in" to using it as something that motivates "us. You can read more in-depth analysis of the end of the novel in our article on the last paragraphs and last line of the novel. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. The eyes of Doctor T.

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. 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… I followed [Tom] over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare Just like the quasi-mysterious and unreal-sounding green light in Chapter 1 , the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg are presented in a confusing and seemingly surreal way :.

Instead of simply saying that there is a giant billboard, Nick first spends several sentences describing seemingly living giant eyes that are hovering in mid-air. Unlike the very gray, drab, and monochrome surroundings, the eyes are blue and yellow. In a novel that is methodically color-coded, this brightness is a little surreal and connects the eyes to other blue and yellow objects. Moreover, the description has elements of horror. The "gigantic" eyes are disembodied, with "no face" and a "nonexistent nose. Adding to this creepy feel is the fact that even after we learn that the eyes are actually part of an advertisement, they are given agency and emotions. They don't simply exist in space, but "look out" and "persistently stare," the miserable landscape causes them to "brood," and they are even able to "exchange a frown" with Tom despite the fact that they have no mouth.

It's clear from this personification of an inanimate object that these eyes stand for something else—a huge, displeased watcher. We were all irritable now with the fading ale and, aware of it, we drove for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. Eckleburg's faded eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby's caution about gasoline…. That locality was always vaguely disquieting, even in the broad glare of afternoon, and now I turned my head as though I had been warned of something behind.

Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. Eckleburg kept their vigil but I perceived, after a moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less than twenty feet away. In one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved aside a little and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. This time, the eyes are a warning to Nick that something is wrong. He thinks the problem is that the car is low on gas, but as we learn, the real problem at the garage is that George Wilson has found out that Myrtle is having an affair.

Of course, Nick is quickly distracted from the billboard's "vigil" by the fact that Myrtle is staring at the car from the room where George has imprisoned her. She is holding her own "vigil" of sorts, staring out the window at what she thinks is the yellow car of Tom, her would-be savior, and also giving Jordan a death stare under the misguided impression that Jordan is Daisy.

The word "vigil" is important here. It refers to staying awake for a religious purpose, or to keep watch over a stressful and significant time. Here, though, both of those meanings don't quite apply, and the word is used sarcastically. The billboard eyes can't interact with the characters, but they do point to—or stand in for—a potential higher authority whose "brooding" and "caution" could also be accompanied by judgment. Their useless vigil is echoed by Myrtle's mistaken one—she is vigilant enough to spot Tom driving, but she is wrong to put her trust in him.

Later, this trust in Tom and the yellow car is what gets her killed. 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? Wilson's glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind. 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.

Here, finally, the true meaning of the odd billboard that everyone finds so disquieting is revealed. To the unhinged George Wilson , first totally distraught over Myrtle's affair and then driven past his breaking point by her death, the billboard's eyes are a watchful God. Wilson doesn't go to church, and thus doesn't have access to the moral instruction that will help him control his darker impulses.

Still, it seems that Wilson wants God, or at least a God-like influence, in his life—based on him trying to convert the watching eyes of the billboard into a God that will make Myrtle feel bad about "everything [she's] been doing. In the way George stares "into the twilight" by himself, there is an echo of what we've often seen Gatsby doing—staring at the green light on Daisy's dock. Both men want something unreachable, and both imbue ordinary objects with overwhelming amounts of meaning.

Even when characters reach out for a guiding truth in their lives, not only are they denied one, but they are also led instead toward tragedy. About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This 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 men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight….

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on 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 that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress. After telling us about the "fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air" 1. Much of it comes from industry: factories that pollute the area around them into a "grotesque" and "ghastly" version of a beautiful countryside.

Instead of the bucolic, green image of a regular farm, here we have a "fantastic farm" fantastic here means "something out of the realm of fantasy" that grows ash instead of wheat and where pollution makes the water "foul" and the air "powdery. In the valley, there is such a thick coating gray dust that it looks like everything is made out of this ashy substance. It's important to note that from a general description of people as "ash-grey men" we now see that ashy description applied specifically to George Wilson.

He is covered in a "veil" of desolation, sadness, hopelessness, and everything else associated with the ash. Also, we see that Myrtle Wilson is the only thing that isn't covered by ash. She visually stands out from her surroundings since she doesn't blend into the "cement color" around her. This makes sense since she is an ambitious character who is eager to escape her life. Notice that she literally steps towards Tom, allying herself with a rich man who is only passing through the ash heaps on his way from somewhere better to somewhere better. I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody.

Then the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us, and I had a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality as we went by. With fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half Astoria—only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the elevated I heard the familiar "jug—jug—spat! We slowed down. Taking a white card from his wallet he waved it before the man's eyes. Excuse me! While West and East Egg are the settings for the ridiculously extravagance of both the old and new money crowd, and Manhattan the setting for business and organized crime , the valley of ashes tends to be where the novel situates the grubby and underhanded manipulations that show the darker side of the surrounding glamor.

This brief mention of the ashheaps sets up the chapter's shocking conclusion, once again positioning Wilson as a man who is coming out of the gray world of ashy pollution and factory dust. Notice how the word "fantastic" comes back. The twisted, macabre world of the valley of ashes is spreading. No longer just on the buildings, roads, and people, it is what Wilson's sky is now made out of as well. At the same time, in combination with Wilson's "glazed" eyes, the word "fantastic" seems to point to his deteriorating mental state. 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. The final reference to the ashheaps is at the moment of the murder-suicide, as George skulks towards Gatsby floating in his pool.

Again, the ashy world is "fantastic"—a word that smacks of scary fairy tales and ghost stories, particularly when combined with the eerie description of Wilson as a "gliding figure" and the oddly shapeless and out of focus "amorphous" trees. It's significant that what threatens the fancy world of the Eggs is the creeping encroachment of the ash that they so look down on and are so disgusted by. Click on the chapter number to read a summary, important character beats, and the themes and symbols the chapter connects with!

The opening lines of the book color how we understand Nick's description of everything that happens in the novel. Nick wants to present himself as a wise, objective, nonjudgmental observer, but in the course of the novel, as we learn more and more about him, we realize that he is snobby and prejudiced. In fact, it is probably because he knows this about himself that he is so eager to start the story he is telling with a long explanation of what makes him the best possible narrator. Gatsby turned out all right at the end; 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.

This is how Nick sums up Gatsby before we have even met him, before we've heard anything about his life. As you read the book, think about how this information informs the way you're responding to Gatsby's actions. How much of what we see about Gatsby is colored by Nick's predetermined conviction that Gatsby is a victim whose "dreams" were "preyed on"? It often feels like Nick is relying on the reader's implicit trust of the narrator to spin Gatsby, make him come across as very sympathetic, and gloss over his flaws. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.

Tom says this at dinner about a book he's really into. Tom is introduced as a bully and a bigot from the very beginning , and his casual racism here is a good indicator of his callous disregard for human life. We will see that his affinity for being "dominant" comes into play whenever he interacts with other people. At the same time, however, Tom tends to surround himself with those who are weaker and less powerful—probably the better to lord his physical, economic, and class power over them.

Daisy tells Nick that these are the first words she said after giving birth to her daughter. This funny and depressing take on what it takes to succeed as a woman in Daisy's world is a good lens into why she acts the way she does. Because she has never had to struggle for anything, because of her material wealth and the fact that she has no ambitions or goals, her life feels empty and meaningless to her. In a way, this wish for her daughter to be a "fool" is coming from a good place. Based on her own experiences, she assumes that a woman who is too stupid to realize that her life is pointless will be happier than one like Daisy herself who is restless and filled with existential ennui which is a fancy way of describing being bored of one's existence. The first time Nick sees him, Gatsby is making this half-prayerful gesture to the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.

This is our first glimpse of his obsession and his quest for the unobtainable. Gatsby makes this reaching movement several times throughout the book , each time because something he has strived for is just out of his grasp. This 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 men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Every time anyone goes from Long Island to Manhattan or back, they go through this depressing industrial area in the middle of Queens. The factories located here pollute the air and land around them—their detritus is what makes the "ash" dust that covers everything and everyone.

This is the place where those who cannot succeed in the rat race end up, hopeless and lacking any way to escape. Check out our focused article for a much more in-depth analysis of what the crucial symbol of "the valley of ashes" stands for in this novel. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. There is no God in the novel. None of the characters seems to be religious, no one wonders about the moral or ethical implications of any actions, and in the end, there are no punishments doled out to the bad or rewards given to the good.

This lack of religious feeling is partly what makes Tom's lie to Myrtle about Daisy being a Catholic particularly egregious. This lack of even a basic moral framework is underscored by the eyes of Doctor T. Eckleburg , a giant billboard that is as close as this world gets to having a watchful authoritative presence. This chapter is our main exposure to Myrtle Wilson, Tom's mistress. Here, we see the main points of her personality—or at least the way that she comes across to Nick. First, it's interesting to note that aside from Tom, whose hulkish physique Nick really pays a lot of attention to, Myrtle is the only character whose physicality is dwelt on at length.

We hear a lot about her body and the way she moves in space—here, we not only get her "sweeping" across the room, "expanding," and "revolving," but also the sense that her "gestures" are somehow "violent. But remember this focus on Myrtle's body when you read Chapter 7 , where this body will be exposed in a shocking way. This bit of violence succinctly encapsulates Tom's brutality , how little he thinks of Myrtle, and it also speaks volumes about their vastly unequal and disturbing relationship. Two things to think about:. It could be a way of maintaining discretion—to keep secret her identity in order to hide the affair.

But, considering everyone in town apparently knows about Myrtle, this doesn't seem to be the reason. More likely is the fact that Tom does actually hold Daisy in much higher regard than Myrtle, and he refuses to let the lower class woman "degrade" his high-class wife by talking about her freely. This is yet again an example of his extreme snobbery. Sometimes this is within socially acceptable boundaries—for example, on the football field at Yale—and sometimes it is to browbeat everyone around him into compliance. It's also interesting that both Tom and Myrtle are such physically present characters in the novel—in this moment, Myrtle is the only character that actually stands up to Tom. In a way, they are a perfect match. I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited.

People were not invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.

Gatsby's parties are the epitome of anonymous, meaningless excess—so much so that people treat his house as a kind of public, or at least commercial, space rather than a private home. This is connected to the vulgarity of new money —you can't imagine Tom and Daisy throwing a party like this. Or Nick for that matter. The random and meaningless indulgence of his parties further highlights Gatsby's isolation from true friends. 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 a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I ascertained.

They're real…. I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you. Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures. 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? Belasco was a renowned theatrical producer, so comparing Gatsby to him here is a way of describing the library as a stage set for a play—in other words, as a magnificent and convincing fake. This sea of unread books is either yet more tremendous waste of resources, or a kind of miniature example of the fact that a person's core identity remains the same no matter how many layers of disguise are placed on top. Gatsby has the money to buy these books, but he lacks the interest, depth, time, or ambition to read and understand them , which is similar to how he regards his quest to get Daisy. He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.

It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care. Lots of Gatsby's appeal lies in his ability to instantly connect with the person he is speaking to , to make that person feel important and valued.

This is probably what makes him a great front man for Wolfsheim's bootlegging enterprise, and connects him with Daisy, who also has a preternaturally appealing quality— her voice. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. The offhanded misogyny of this remark that Nick makes about Jordan is telling in a novel where women are generally treated as objects at worst or lesser beings at best. Even our narrator, ostensibly a tolerant and nonjudgmental observer, here reveals a core of patriarchal assumptions that run deep. While in Christian tradition there is the concept of cardinal virtues, honesty is not one of them.

So here, since the phrase "cardinal sin" is the more familiar concept, there is a small joke that Nick's honesty is actually a negative quality, a burden. Nick is telling us about his scrupulous honesty a second after he's revealed that he's been writing love letters to a girl back home every week despite wanting to end their relationship, and despite dating a girl at his office, and then dating Jordan in the meantime. So honesty to Nick doesn't really mean what it might to most people. What does it mean to have our narrator tell us in one breath that he is honest to a fault, and that he doesn't think that most other people are honest?

This sounds like a humblebrag kind of observation. Plus, this observation comes at the end of the third chapter, after we've met all the major players finally—so it's like the board has been set, and now we finally have enough information to distrust our narrator. You see, I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.

It's also interesting that Gatsby uses his origin story as a transaction —he's not sharing his past with Nick to form a connection, but as advance payment for a favor. At the same time, there's a lot of humor in this scene. Imagine any time you told anyone something about yourself, you then had to whip out some physical object to prove it was true! In a novel so concerned with fitting in, with rising through social ranks , and with having the correct origins, it's always interesting to see where those who fall outside this ranking system are mentioned.

Just he earlier described loving the anonymity of Manhattan , here Nick finds himself enjoying a similar melting-pot quality as he sees an indistinctly ethnic funeral procession "south-eastern Europe" most likely means the people are Greek and a car with both black and white people in it. What is now racist terminology is here used pejoratively, but not necessarily with the same kind of blind hatred that Tom demonstrates. Instead, Nick can see that within the black community there are also social ranks and delineations—he distinguishes between the way the five black men in the car are dressed, and notes that they feel ready to challenge him and Gatsby in some car-related way.

Do they want to race? To compare clothing? It's unclear, but it adds to the sense of possibility that the drive to Manhattan always represents in the book. No, he's a gambler. The idea staggered me. I remembered of course that the World's Series had been fixed in 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.

Nick's amazement at the idea of one man being behind an enormous event like the fixed World Series is telling. For one thing, the powerful gangster as a prototype of pulling-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps, self-starting man, which the American Dream holds up as a paragon of achievement, mocks this individualist ideal. It also connects Gatsby to the world of crime, swindling, and the underhanded methods necessary to effect enormous change. In a smaller, less criminal way, watching Wolfshiem maneuver has clearly rubbed off on Gatsby and his convolutedly large-scale scheme to get Daisy's attention by buying an enormous mansion nearby. It wouldn't take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing.

I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there. Nick recognizes that what he quickly dismissed in the moment could easily have been the moral quandary that altered his whole future. It seems that Nick thinks this was his chance to enter the world of crime—if we assume that what Gatsby was proposing is some kind of insider trading or similarly illegal speculative activity—and be thus trapped on the East Coast rather than retreating to the Midwest.

It's striking that Nick recognizes that his ultimate weakness—the thing that can actually tempt him—is money. In this way, he is different from Gatsby, whose temptation is love, and Tom, whose temptation is sex —and of course, he is also different because he resists the temptation rather than going all-in. Although Nick's refusal could be spun as a sign of his honesty, it instead underscores how much he adheres to rules of politeness. After all, he only rejects the idea because he feels he "had no choice" about the proposal because it was "tactless. On the one hand, the depth of Gatsby's feelings for Daisy is romantic.

He's living the hyperbole of every love sonnet and torch song ever written. After all, this is the first time we see Gatsby lose control of himself and his extremely careful self-presentation. But on the other hand, does he actually know anything about Daisy as a human being? Notice that it's "the idea" that he's consumed with, not so much the reality. The word "wonder" makes it sound like he's having a religious experience in Daisy's presence. The pedestal that he has put her on is so incredibly high there's nothing for her to do but prove disappointing.

Almost immediately when he's finally got her, Daisy starts to fade from an ideal object of desire into a real life human being. It doesn't even matter how potentially wonderful a person she may be—she could never live up to the idea of an "enchanted object" since she is neither magical nor a thing. There is also a question here of "what's next? If you have only one goal in life, and you end up reaching that goal, what is your life's purpose now?

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. Here is the clearest connection of Gatsby and the ideal of the independent, individualistic, self-made man —the ultimate symbol of the American Dream. It's telling that in describing Gatsby this way, Nick also links him to other ideas of perfection. Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy's running around alone, for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby's party. Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of oppressiveness—it stands out in my memory from Gatsby's other parties that summer.

There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy's eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

What for Nick had been a center of excitement, celebrity, and luxury is now suddenly a depressing spectacle. It's interesting that partly this is because Daisy and Tom are in some sense invaders—their presence disturbs the enclosed world of West Egg because it reminds Nick of West Egg's lower social standing. It's also key to see that having Tom and Daisy there makes Nick self-aware of the psychic work he has had to do to "adjust" to the vulgarity and different "standards" of behavior he's been around.

Remember that he entered the novel on a social footing similar to that of Tom and Daisy. Now he's suddenly reminded that by hanging around with Gatsby, he has debased himself. 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.

Just as earlier we were treated to Jordan as a narrator stand-in , now we have a new set of eyes through which to view the story—Daisy's. Her snobbery is deeply ingrained, and she doesn't do anything to hide it or overcome it unlike Nick, for example.