Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F.

Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ADJECTIVES

IN F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S

The Great Gatsby

By

Dr. Ahmed Salahuddin

Professor of Linguistics
Zagazig University

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Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Table of Contents
Part One: Stylistic Analysis 5
1 Introduction 5
1. 1. The Author and the Novel 5
1. 2. The Theme of the Novel 5
1.2.1 Conflict between Status and Aspirations 5
1.2.2 A medieval Romance 7
1.2.3 Original Sin and Magical Transformation 8
1.2.4 A Social Novel 8
1.2.5 An Ironic Dream of Excellence 8
1. 3. Fitzgerald and Other Artists 9
1. 4. The Novel and the American Dream 10
1. 5. Daisy, the False Object of the Dream 14
1. 6. Jay Gatsby, the Aspirant 15
1. 7. Myrtle Wilson's Aspirations 17
1. 8. Style and Technique 18
2 Research Questions and Statistical Analysis 21
2.1 Research Questions of the Study 21
2.2 Statistical Analysis 22
3 The Wilsons 27
3.1 Concrete Adjectives in Myrtle 27
3.2 Abstract Adjectives in Myrtle 29
3.3 Concrete Adjectives in Mr. Wilson 29
3.4 Abstract Adjectives in Mr. Wilson 29
4 Daisy 30
4.1 Abstract Adjectives in Daisy 30
4.1.1 Abstract Adjectives and Daisy’s 30
Beauty/Appearance
4.1.2 Abstract Adjectives and Daisy’s Instability 31
4.1.3 Abstract Adjectives and Daisy’s Hypocrisy 32
4.1.4 Abstract Adjectives and Daisy’s Misery 32
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

4.2 Concrete Adjectives in Daisy 33

4.2.1 Concrete Adjectives and Daisy’s 33
Beauty/Appearance
4.2.2 Concrete Adjectives and Daisy’s Wealth 33
4.2.3 Concrete Adjectives and Daisy’s 34
Instability
5 Jay Gatsby 34
5.1 Abstract Adjectives in Jay Gatsby 34
5.1.1 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby’s 34
Corruption
5.1.2 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby’s 36
Attraction
5.1.3 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby’s Dream 36
5.1.4 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby’s Parties 39
5.1.5 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby’s 40
Reservedness
5.1.6 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby’s Wealth 41
5.2 Concrete Adjectives in Jay Gatsby 42
5.2.1 Concrete Adjectives and Gatsby’s Wealth 42
5.2.2 Concrete Adjectives and Gatsby’s parties 43
5.2.3 Concrete Adjectives and Gatsby’s Dream 44
6 Conclusions 48
6.1 general Commentary 48
6.2 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives 50
6.3 Fields of Abstract and Concrete Adjectives 53
6.4 Symbolism and Images 53
Part Two: The Text of The Novel 55
Exercises 195

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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Part One: Stylistic Analysis

1 Introduction
1.1 The Author and the Novel
Fitzgerald's age, the post-war period, suffered from radical changes that
deeply affected the American economic and intellectual life. In this Jazz
age, as Fitzgerald calls it, everybody realized that something was wrong.
Images of The Waste Land and the sterility and barrenness of life
prevailed the writings of the twenties. Fitzgerald was able to catch the
trouble of this age, of this generation, and portray it. He realized that the
American dream of wealth and wonder is replaced by the hard realities
of the republic, the realities that the Americans had to accept.
The Great Gatsby is a world masterpiece in the true sense of the word. It
reflects the modern American fiction in its absorption of American
subject-matter, character, and language. Fitzgerald made successful use
of various techniques that serve to place the novel among the well-
remembered works of art of the American literature: the lyrical effect of
the first person narrator, the selective delicacy of events, names, scenes,
and flashbacks and the employment of suggestive poetic language that
says much by way of implication.
1.2 The Theme of the Novel
The Great Gatsby was variously interpreted. The novel was said to be (i)
a conflict between status and aspirations, (ii) a medieval romance of grail
and quest, (iii) a religious story of the original sin of man being trapped
between what is and what would be, of man attempting to change fate
through magical transformation, (iv) a social comedy, and (v) an ironic
dream of excellence. These themes will be discussed in the following
sections.
1.2.1 A Conflict between Status and Aspirations
According to Berman (1994: 75), The Great Gatsby is a story of "the
conflict between status and aspirations," and the conflict is severe
because "a change of identity does not go unchallenged." This change of
identity, Americans one day believed, can be achieved through "their
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clothing, their houses and apartments, their food, drink, and even the
sense of art appropriate to their new status. Their aspirations find
fulfillment, they wrongly assumed, through material gain while they
themselves are rejected by the rich; they are denied their dream of
aspiration to a better status.
Bradbury (1984: 65) believes that the novel is "the story of a gross
materialistic, careless society of coarse wealth on top of a sterile world.
Onto it is cast an extraordinary illusion, the self-created Gatsby" whose
"poor past and corrupt economic supports are hidden in his glow" and
who "decorates his entire world through his love for Daisy."
Along the same lines, Salzman et al. (1984: 289) believe that the hero's
"jaunty extravagant manner, worn thin but never destroyed by his love
for an unattainable woman, expresses the hopes and fears of the lost
Generation of the 1920s." These hopes of excellence are haunted by the
fears of the then present lack of resources, and the challenge of poverty.
The conflict between status and aspirations is interpreted in terms of
wealth in Cowley (1985: 71). He states that the wealth of East Eggers
takes the form of solid possession. Tom is "wealth brutalized by
selfishness and arrogance." Daisy is “the butterfly soul of wealth” as she
“offers a continual but false promise, since at heart she is self-centered."
Jordan "apparently lives by the old standards but she uses them only as
subterfuge." On the other hand, the wealth of West Eggers is "fluid
income that might cease to flow" at any time. West Eggers "have worked
furiously to rise in the world but they will never reach East Egg for all
the money they spend." This makes the conflict even more severe.
Ornstein (1985: 74) ascribes this conflict to the American thirst for
money, which is "a crucial motive" in Fitzgerald's novels, "yet none of
his major characters are materialists, for money is never their final goal."
They use money as a medium for one purpose: to rise in the world.
Ornstein (ibid: 76) juxtaposes Gatsby with the high-society characters:
Tom and Daisy. Gatsby, "the spiritual descendant" of the Dutch sailors,
set out like them for the gold but "stumbled on a dream." He "devotes his
life for recapturing" this dream, this lost love. In contrast, Daisy mourns
for "her white girlhood," Tom for "a vanished football game." Daisy and
Tom retreat into their wealth and their past but Gatsby sets out for a
future and, deplorably, wants to fix that past at the same time.
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1.2.2 A Medieval Romance

According to Cowley (ibid: 72), this novel is Fitzgerald's version of the
"story of the suitor betrayed by the princess and murdered in his
innocence" that "has survived as a legend for other times." Daisy retreats
in her and Tom's wealth for stability and protection against whatever love
Gatsby offers since this love is endangered by instability.
Ornstein (ibid: 73) also assumes that the theme of the novel is "the
unending quest of the romantic dream, which is forever betrayed ... and
yet redeemed in men's minds." He states that the fable of east and west
"does not lament the decline of American civilization" but "mourns the
eternal lateness of the present hour suspended between the past of
romantic memory and the future of romantic promise which ever
recedes" before the Americans’ eyes (ibid:79).
Mandel (1988: 544-5) defines a medieval romance as a story about
"warrior-knights who strive for fame in the world and the ladies who
encourage them to ever greater accomplishment." He states that Gatsby
found in World War I a suitable chance "to establish both his heroic
credentials and his validity as a courtly lover," and so he becomes like
medieval knights. Like Gatsby, a medieval knight risked his life "to
impress his beloved," to win her heart. In both The Great Gatsby and the
medieval romance, Mandel (ibid: 547) argues, "the beloved's attitude
determines the courtly lover's behaviour."
Mandel (ibid: 549) points out the fact that "Tom Buchanan's court, like
that of King Arthur, ... is morally rotten," and that his "adulterous love
affair with Myrtle" reflects "the mortal tone of his court and his world."
Mandel (ibid: 553-4) also assumes that in the novel there are two main
impediments that Gatsby can never overcome: Time and Daisy. For "no
matter how fast Gatsby runs, how far he stretches out his arms, no
amount of love or energy or imagination" can change Daisy's character
or repeat the past in such a way as for Gatsby to win back his past love
story. Mandel (ibid: 554) interprets The Great Gatsby as "a medieval
romance" because of the existence in it of "vigils, quests and grails" that
are "the conscious notations of Fitzgerald's creative-imaginative
intellect," and that suggest "the vast body of conscious and unconscious
literary configurations that derive directly from medieval romance."

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1.2.3 Original Sin and Magical Transformation

Hart (1993: 37-8) believes that The Great Gatsby can be read as "a
religious novel" or at least as a novel "profoundly concerned with
religious issues." Gatsby is a son of God whose fatal tragedy lies in his
attempt to "win a victory over time and mortality." Gatsby is "the divinity
of a world whose distinguishing motif is magical transformation." This
magical transformation is an essential feature of man in his combat
against fate.
According to Gindin (1985: 109), Fitzgerald echoes in this novel "the
paradox implicit in the doctrine of original sin, the concept of man
inevitably trapped by the difference between what he would desperately
like to be and what he is." This trap leads Gatsby to his inescapable
destiny of losing present and future for attaining the irrevocable past.
1.2.4 A Social Novel
For Way (1980: 111), the novel "is best regarded as a social comedy,"
but this term "implies a mode of writing which is satirical and moral."
He states that Fitzgerald's writing frequently "rises to a level of rich
absurdity where comedy is not subordinated to a satirical or moral point
but is itself the point." He quotes the passage in which Myrtle buys a dog
and assumes that it illustrates not only the false gentility of Myrtle but
rather the Dickensian "irresistibly joyous and liberating sense of the
ridiculous."
1.2.5 An Ironic Dream of Excellence
According to Wagner-Martin (1990:46), the irony of the novel is that
Gatsby's "dream was faulty" and that, in the process of achieving it, he
"eventually destroyed both the dream and himself." This irony, Shain
(1964: 107-8) believes, is of a wide range; "the ironic intentions" of the
story "encompass the wonderfully comic vulgarity of Myrtle ... as well
as Daisy's almost irresistible charm."
Ornstein (ibid: 75) stresses this ironic aspect of the novel. He states that
the author "saw his romantic dream threaded by a double irony.” Thus,
“those who possess the necessary means lack the will … to pursue a
dream” while “those with the heightened sensitivity to the promises of

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life have it because they are disinherited, forever barred from the white
palace."
Magill (1993: 205) states that the public life of the Fitzgeralds
"epitomized the dizzy spirals of the 1920s—wild parties, wild spending."
He quotes Fitzgerald's statement that "America's great promise is that
something is going to happen, but it never does. America is the moon
that never rose." This statement, Magill argues, can serve well as an
epigraph for the novel.
According to Wagner-Martin (ibid: 47), "the final effect of the novel is
simply a mood of lost promise." Gatsby's attempt to make something of
himself has only "changed the self he could have become into the empty
façade of an unprincipled person."
Rowe (1988: 107) points out the symbolic value of Gatsby's life. Gatsby's
"unblinking indifference to the ugly and criminal aspects of his own
nature serves as a psychic counterpart to America's historical innocence
about the sources of its own wealth, its tie to the exploitative realties of
a fallen world."
1.3 Fitzgerald and Other Artists
The Great Gatsby gains much of its effect, according to Wagner-Martin
(ibid: 47), from "the highly symbolic scaffolding" that the author creates.
"The wasteland effect ... underlines the character's almost desperate
search for fulfillment." The trip to Tom and Myrtle's flat and the fateful
journey into the city "illustrate the pace of these ill-at-ease questers."
This is confirmed by Berman (ibid: 55), who states that Daisy's lines
‘What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon ... and the day after that, and
the next thirty years’ “echo The Waste Land lines:
What shall we do tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?”
According to Bloom (1985: 2), the qualities of the moral balance and
affective rightness "seem augmented through the perspective of lapsed
time." In addition, "what has been augmented also is the Eliotic
phantasmagoria of The Waste Land imagery." Thus, Nick Carraway, the
lyrical narrator, echoing the nightmare of sterility and barrenness of the

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Waste Land, speaks of "what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated
in the wake of his dreams."
Again, Wagner-Martin (ibid: 45-6) assumes that the linked scenes of the
novel ascribe "symbolic—majestic—significance" to the characters. The
novel "can be read as an ambivalent answer to Eliot's The Waste Land,
not only because it "does not deny the problems of modern culture that
Eliot portrayed" but rather because it "presents characters who at least
recognize some of the measures necessary to deal with those problems."
Bloom (ibid: 3) shows Keats's influence upon Fitzgerald. His "deepest
affinity to Keats is in the basic stance of his work, at once rhetorical,
psychological and even cosmological." In Ode on a Grecian Urn and in
this novel, Bloom argues, "the perpetual encounter is between the moral
poet (Gatsby, Diver) ... and an immoral goddess woman (Daisy,
Nicole)." Bloom also assumes that many critics believe that "Fitzgerald
shares also in Conrad's sense of reality and its treacheries" and that he
found in Conrad "a seer of the contemporary abyss" of Eliot's
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion
in The Hollow Man, or, in the language of Heart of Darkness, of "a vision
of grayness without form."
Bloom (ibid: 2) states that in Tennyson's Maud, the monologist
proclaims My heart is a handful of dust, arguing that Fitzgerald's dust is
closer to Tennyson's heart than to Eliot's fear." He also assumes that
"Fitzgerald's violence has that curious suddenness we associate with the
same narrative quality in E. M. Forster."
1.4 The Novel and the American Dream
Bewley (1985: 32-42) believes that the novel is "an exploration of the
American dream," and "an attempt to determine that concealed boundary
that divides" the reality, promise and faith in the possibilities of life
embodied in Gatsby, and the hard tangible illusions that "threaten to
invade the whole of the picture." Bewley also argues that Fitzgerald
delays the reader's meeting with Gatsby "face to face" until he “has
concretely created his fantastic world of Gatsby's vision, for it is the
element" in which the reader must meet Gatsby if he is "to understand
his impersonal significance."
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Gatsby's ordeal, according to Bewley (ibid: 32-42), is that he has to

"separate the foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams from the
reality of the dream itself” so that he can maintain the "gigantic unreal
stature" of his vision and impose it on his guests. At the end of the party
in which he tries to separate the foul dust, a symbol of his selective
nature, Gatsby stands alone, against the sudden emptiness and the
complete isolation he suffers from, paying his guests farewell. Here, he
"is not merely a likable romantic hero; he is a creature of myth in whom
is incarnated the aspiration and the ordeal of his race." The immediate
function of the green light, Bewley argues, "is that it signals Gatsby into
his future away from the cheapness" of the love affair with which Daisy
is satisfied. The American dream, "stretched between a golden past and
a golden future, is always betrayed by a desolate present—a moment of
fruit rinds and discarded flowers and crushed flowers." Daisy has at
present "dimmed a little in luster" and cannot help Gatsby move from his
"historic past" into his "historic future" because the present is desolate.
Hook (1992: 55-6) pursues the formation or birth of the dream and traces
it back into Gatsby's adolescence. He assumes that "dreams and reveries
had initially translated James Gatz into Jay Gatsby." Daisy's role is that
she "had given dreams and reveries flesh and blood." This is why all his
"yearning and aspirations ... had seemed to take on tangible shape in her
person." This is also why she "had become the ideal to which he was
dedicated." Gatsby, so Nick expects, never really believed in the
existence of Daisy's daughter before seeing her because the child belongs
to the world of reality that Gatsby cannot accept. Moreover, for the
romantic hero's misfortune, Daisy "is firmly rooted in the reality that
Gatsby seeks to transcend."
Gindin (ibid: 116-7) maintains that for the sake of his dream, Gatsby
"abandons his ineffectual and undistinguished father ... and attaches
himself to a surrogate, the millionaire miner, Dan Cody." This inability
to confess his past resulted in the fact that "the dream Gatsby represented
was always flawed, always impossible to achieve" because it is a promise
of a world "which could never be fulfilled no matter how dedicated the
aspirant" is. This difference between "promise and achievement,
between vision and reality" is the story of America, the story of man.

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Ornstein (ibid: 76-7) believes that the glowing world of East Egg attracts,
rather tempts, all the characters. The Buchanans settle permanently in
East Egg. Nick comes to the East hoping to "unfold the shining secrets"
of wealth. Besides, "Gatsby's green light shines in only one direction
from the east ... across the bay to his imitation mansion in West Egg.
Ornstein ascribes the destruction of the hero’s dream to the fact that this
"dream of self-improvement is realized" through his dual, corrupt
partnership with Cody in the past and with Wolfshiem in the present.
Salzman (ibid: 290) juxtaposes the hero's "meager and dour" funeral and
his dream, the dream of a man who was "young, effervescent, clinging
fast to a garish future while dreaming of an irretrievable past." The
humiliating funeral, thus juxtaposed against the half-understood, half-
revealed, half-concealed dream, makes it look as tempting to the reader
as it is to Gatsby.
Rowe (ibid: 114) maintains that the hero's "amorally dissociated nature"
is most clearly delineated in "his reaction to Myrtle Wilson's death," for
he "shows no concern for the woman who was killed by Daisy's reckless
driving." Daisy's reaction is for Gatsby "the only thing that mattered"
owing to his "unwavering focus on [her], his concomitant lack of feeling
for the dead woman."
Way (ibid: 109) argues that "the core of Gatsby's tragedy is not only that
he lived by dreams but that the woman and the class and the way of life
of which he dreamed ... fell so short of the scope of his imagination."
Daisy, the incarnation of his dream, is less real than Myrtle; she is "a
trivial, callous, cowardly woman who may dream a little herself but who
will not let her dreams or such unpleasant realities as running over Myrtle
Wilson disturb her comfort."
Hart (ibid: 39) argues that the hero has "all the customary divine
trappings" which "represent the divinity of his magical world." But this
magical world cannot turn into reality through magical transformation.
This is why Gatsby, along with his dream, is destroyed.
Parker (1985: 152) points out that most of the "observations on time and
change are made by Nick in his role as a narrator because he, unlike
Gatsby and Daisy, learned to respect time. Gatsby’s ordeal is that he
"never once deigns to respect time.” He fails to abolish Daisy's past
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which goes against, rather contravenes, his powerful, fiery dream. Time,
as Miller (1975: 201) shows, "appears as submissive to [Gatsby's] will
as wealth or power." To Gindin (ibid: 117), the characters of the novel,
products of history, are "intrinsically related to the past." Tom, the
corrupt aspect of the past, triumphs over Gatsby, the romanticized
version of the past, thus winning Daisy, the prize that has also been
corrupted by the past.
The decadence of Gatsby, Bradbury (ibid: 65) believes, is that he aims
"to transfigure money into love—a symbolist dream, an assault on
reality." He is "a corrupt dreamer" while Daisy is "a corrupt object of
love, married to a violent, damaging husband."
According to Trilling (1985: 15), Fitzgerald "is conscious of what preyed
on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams. It is a love
that is destructive by reason of its very tenderness."
Magill (ibid: 205) argues that Fitzgerald never intended Gatsby to be "a
realistic portrayal" of the hero; he is "a romantic hero, always somewhat
unreal, bogus and absurd." Gatsby "stands for hope, for romantic belief,
for innocence" in spite of the "corrupt sources of his wealth ...
bootlegging and gambling."
Gatsby's dream of self-improvement made him, Salzman (ibid: 289)
argues, build "his mansion across the bay from where [Daisy] lived, and
since then he has spent the nights staring with unremitting yearning at
the green light" that always burns at the dock of her house.
Wagner-Martin ( ibid: 47) observes that the flashback to Gatsby's
boyhood by the father, who cannot understand his own son's tragedy,
reveals "the trap of a highly romanticized ambition" that tempted the hero
into destroying both himself and his ambition.
In Gatsby's quest of his dream, the only course conceivable to Gatsby is
to pursue his lost Daisy and convince her of her error and, Shain (ibid:
106-7) states, "to show he is worthy of her by the only symbols available
to them both, a large house, dozens of silk shirts and elaborate parties."
But the incarnation cannot be completed since Daisy believes only “in
the symbols themselves, not the purer reality" that they embody, and she
eventually "sacrifices her lover to the world."

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1.5 Daisy: The False Object of the Dream

Daisy exists, Bewley (ibid: 38-40) assumes, "at two well-defined levels
in the novel. She is what she is— but she exists at the level of Gatsby's
vision of her." She admired the moving-picture actress because she, like
Daisy herself, is merely an empty "gesture divorced forever from the
tiresomeness of human reality." In Gatsby’s company, she seeks "safety
from human reality which the empty gesture implies," but she fails to
understand that his gorgeous gestures are not simply "vacant images of
romance and sophistication" but also "an aspiration towards the
possibility of life." Daisy's significance lies in the fact that she failed "to
constitute the objective-correlative of Gatsby's vision." Her failure is
related to the larger failure of "Gatsby's society to satisfy his need." This
is why Gatsby sees not in, but beyond, Daisy, "the heart of his ultimate
vision” of which she is merely the green light signaling for him.
Wagner-Martin (ibid, 46-7) observes that "Daisy's role in the novel is
both ambivalent and ironic," wondering whether she is "worthy of
Gatsby's love" or her betrayal of him warrants "the reader's disapproval."
Daisy is bewildered in her response to his "illicit but romantic courtship."
She is torn between love in "a life of much lower standing" and stability
with "a man she has—perhaps wrongly—married." Her final choice is
expected in the light of "women's position within the economic milieu"
of the 1920s. Her final choice and her flaw are less her own than they are
the consequence of the social and economic system that made middle
and higher class women "dependent for value on their marital state and
on their physical beauty." Laying the blame of the tragedy on Daisy is,
according to Hermansson (1977: 74), as "inappropriate" as Gatsby's
"seeking there a foundation for the rock of the world." Her bewilderment
between Tom and Gatsby pushes her, according to Salzman (ibid: 290),
"to curb the mounting tension" between them by suggesting "a drive to
New York city where a confrontation ensues." Daisy's gravest fault,
Hermansson (ibid: 73) states, is that she did not confess "that she was
driving the death car ... thereby allowing Gatsby to shoulder the blame
... and be killed." She manages, according to Ornstein (ibid: 77), to
assimilate "the urbane ethic of the East which allows a bored wife a
casual discreet affair." But, unlike Gatsby's uninvited guests, she does
not "wink at the illegal and the criminal" aspects of his character.
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The spiritual, not the material, distance between Daisy and Tom is great.
There is a wide gap between them. When they speak together, Berman
(ibid: 144) argues, they seldom "tell the truth” but become “inarticulate."
Daisy's voice, not speech, is golden. Tom does not possess "explanatory
language." Daisy often substitutes "tone for speech," while Tom "act for
speech." For Tom, Daisy is no more than ‘a beautiful little fool,’ a wife
who can be deceived. For her, he is the source of material stability, not
of human sympathy. The defeatedness of her fairy-like attitude in front
of his hard materialism is significant. When he entered the room in
Chapter One, ‘there was a boom as he shut the window; the caught wind
died out and curtains and the rugs and the two women ballooned’ to the
floor. Daisy's flattery of Nick finds fulfillment only when Tom goes out.
Eventually, she goes to Gatsby's mansion secretively.
1.6 Jay Gatsby: The Aspirant
According to Parker (ibid: 141-4), Fitzgerald's achievement in this novel
is his ability to include the two versions of the romantic hero in one
version. The first is that of the idealist hero who is loyal to, and relentless
in, his quest for some transcending object. The second is that of the hero
of "sentimental education" who has an essentially inward quest, and is
compelled to discover, or modify, his own identity.
Trilling (ibid: 19-20) states that "Gatsby, divided between power and
dream, comes inevitably to stand for America itself." He, like America,
"sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God."
When he is "forced to admit that his lost Daisy did perhaps love her
husband, he says ‘in any case it was just personal.’" This remark seems
"overwhelming in its intellectual audacity" because with it, Gatsby
"achieves an insane greatness convincing us that he really is a Platonic
conception of himself, really some sort of son of God."
Pauly (1993: 34) wonders whether Gatsby is, as Nick assumes, a
romantic hero "wholly dedicated to the love his life," or, as Nick never
considers, "a devious criminal who pursues his business with the same
evasion and intrigue" as in his plotted reunion with Daisy. Pauly accepts
both possibilities: he is in favour of this dual, ambivalent interpretation.
Gatsby is both "obsessed with the girl of his dreams" and at the same

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time "more intent upon his own objectives and more manipulative" than
Nick innocently believes.
According to Cowley (ibid: 66), Gatsby does not seek money in Daisy,
but "position at the peak of the social hierarchy, and the girl becomes a
symbol of that position, the incarnation of its mysterious power." This is
why he "directs his whole life to winning back her love."
Magill (ibid: 205) argues that Gatsby "pursues his dream of romantic
success without ever understanding that it has escaped him ... [and] fails
to understand that he cannot recapture the past."
Gindin (ibid: 116) believes that Gatsby is not only "the embodiment of
the American dream: the mystery of its origin, its impossible
romanticism” but also “its belief in its capacity to recapture a past that
may never have existed ... its faith in an unknown future, its ultimate
futility."
Bewley (ibid: 33-4) assumes that the scene in which Gatsby shows "his
stacks of beautiful imported shirts" is a failure of his critical control of
values." He shows them "with a reverential humility in the presence of
some inner vision he cannot consciously grasp, but towards which he
consciously struggles in the only way he knows." Bewley (ibid: 44-5)
draws a comparison between Tom and Gatsby. He states that their youth
is an essential quality of them both. The climax of Tom's youth is in the
past, its energy is in its body, and he lives now in an "uneasy arrogant
leisure on his brutal acquisitions." But the climax of Gatsby's youth is in
the future, "its energy is not in its body, but in its spirit." Tom's
sentimentality is "based on... self-pity" but Gatsby's "is all aspiration and
goodness."
1.7 Myrtle Wilson's Aspirations
Berman (ibid: 70) argues that Myrtle, like Gatsby, "has to make
transition ... between groups foreign to each other—and, in the twenties,
hostile to each other." They have similar aspirations of self-
improvement: she is "part of labour but wants to become part of capital"
while he attempts "to enter a closed social system, to penetrate the world
of old money." Berman (ibid: 61-3) also assumes that "Nature and
Fitzgerald have made Myrtle ... full-breasted, fleshy, stout ... she dresses
in yards of chiffon which help her to imitate high society." Like Tom's
16
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

own ideas, Myrtle is "old fashioned ... an antidote for modern times." She
is "socially subordinate" but "kept ... not only a replication of class sexual
relation but of ideal domestic life." Tom seeks in her "a milieu with a
woman waiting in an apartment for him." Berman quotes Myrtle's lines:
‘I want to get one of those dogs ... I want to get one for the apartment.
They're nice to have— a dog.’ He points out that she uses three verbs:
want, get, and have to "describe her acquisition." These verbs are the
"market place phrases ... the operative phrases of consumer society."
1.8 Style and Technique
Fitzgerald's characters are, Wagner-Martin (ibid: 48) argues, thoroughly
American not only "in their fantastic dreams and their frenetic efforts to
reach them" but also "in their sometimes misguided aims." This is why
the novel receives what can be called "active reading." The reader has
"an ongoing dialogue with the characters." The reader always wishes he
could guide, advise or warn the characters. T.S. Eliot (quoted in Wagner-
Martin, ibid: 73) admired the novel and suggested that the best fiction
"demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not
prepared to give” and that “only sensibilities trained on poetry can
wholly appreciate [modern fiction]." Berman (ibid: 68) argues that
Myrtle's acquisitions are stressed even more in the language she uses.
When she says ‘all the things I got to do,’ she means "all the things I got
to get." The agenda includes ‘a massage and a wave and a collar for the
dog and one of those cute little ash trays ... and a wreath with a black silk
bow for mother's grave.’ The use of and four times here is noteworthy.
It represents the world of material acquisition regarded by Myrtle as the
green card into the high society. Berman (ibid: 52) also points out that
the text of the novel "states itself in the language of movement and
navigation" from beginning to end. So, Tom drifts ... Jordan drives ...
Myrtle wants to go west. This language of navigation "is deeply rooted
in the text ... finally we see Gatsby floating in a current."
Coleman (1997: 19-20) states that conversation in East Egg "serves not
to convey information so much as to create an intimate interaction worth
sustaining as an end in itself." For example, Daisy's "ethereal repartee"
is quite different from the way Tom talks to Myrtle: ‘I want to see you ...
get on the next train ... I'll meet you by the newsstand.’" This language

17
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

used by Tom clearly conveys information; it is different from Tom's

language in his speech to Daisy and Nick in Chapter One.
Giltrow (1997: 479-80) praises the lyrical, somewhat poetic style of
Nick's narration: "this lyricism is accomplished grammatically in the
continuation of sentences seemingly reluctant to end, sentences which go
on after a syntactic core had delivered its message." He quotes the
following sentence from a paragraph about the reveries of Gatsby's first
acquaintance with Daisy near the beginning of chapter Eight:
There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more
beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities
taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty
and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent
of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were
scarcely withered.
He states that after the core of syntactic structure at the beginning of the
sentence, "everything contained in the appositive is suggestive, an
elaboration of the mystery that surrounds Daisy, heightened especially
by the ephemeral and transient nature of time present."
Way (ibid: 105) praises this memorable passage, assuming that the
validity of its rhetoric is indeed "incontestable." He argues that "Gatsby's
feelings for Daisy, the moment he tries to define them, become the banal
stereotypes of romantic magazine fiction."
Hermansson (ibid: 65) states that Nick, like Pandarus in Troilus and
Criseyde is "reduced to the realization that his "fund of suitable words
no longer avails him." This is why he is often forced to resort to
"adjectives [and adverbs] that merely describe indescribability:
unutterable ... unutterably … incommunicable ... indefinable ... and
inexplicable." These lexical items make us suspect some intensity in his
conception of the dream-affair that could not be measured. This results
from the fact that "Gatsby's longing for transcendence ... falls to Nick to
express it."
Garret (1985: 114) assumes that the novel "is a complicated composite
of several distinct kinds of prose"— narration by Nick, direct discourse,
first-person narration by Jordan, indirect discourse in a third person
narration by Michaelis, and, the most outrageous of all, imagined direct
18
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

dialogue with Gatsby after his death. Garret states that any single style
would not have been adequate alone "to do justice to the story ... of a
world not so much in transition as falling apart without realizing it."
Rowe (ibid: 116) argues that Gatsby's death is not "the death of a
gangster ... as the newspapers would report it." His death is described in
a paragraph "concerned only with motion— the gentlest of attending
breezes wafts the laden mattress on its transit towards the drain ... the
mattress is revolved by the leaves as life by the seasons, while its trail is
marked by a thin red circle, sign and symbol of the hero's passion." The
language of this paragraph is not journalese; it does not describe the
death of a gangster. It has, writes Robert Long in The Achievement of
Gatsby (qtd. in Rowe, ibid: 155-6), "the nature of a lament or elegy for a
dead friend," Gatsby who "has been evoked as a slain god, a youthful
deity of spring, or a morning light, sacrificed to the progression of time."
Trilling (ibid: 20) believes that the essence of Fitzgerald's success is the
voice of his prose because the reader hears in it "the tenderness toward
human desire that modifies a true firmness of moral judgment" and
because it has, in spite of its modesty, "a largeness, even a stateliness
which derives from Fitzgerald's connection with tradition and with
mind."
Watson (1994: 182) states that Fitzgerald's memorable passages that
begin and end the novel "are the emphatic points in which he
concentrates his best metaphors and images." These beautiful "lush
endings strike some readers as uniformly overwritten and others as
paragons of beauty."
Young (1987: 640) states that in spite of its shortness, the novel includes
everything necessary to tell Gatsby's story. Fitzgerald accomplished this
feat through (i) his choice of point of view, Nick's angle of narration, and
(ii) his use of implication. Young also points out that the values of
Gatsby's world are conveyed through "sight images," and that sense
images; "those images more subtly associated with deep feelings," such
as sounds, tastes and smells "are conspicuously absent." This shows how
much Gatsby's world is trivial, shallow and easy to dismantle.
Shain (ibid: 106) quotes Fitzgerald writing to his editor "I want to write
something new, something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and
19
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

intricately patterned" (notice the repeated use of and) and states that the
novel "is worthy of all these adjectives."
Miller (ibid: 201) argues that the lyric of the novel evokes more feeling
than thought. Nick "responds in a deeply personal way to the events he
witnesses, translating them into feelings that lie so deep as to defy
precision of language."
The Great Gatsby is a parable of American life in the twentieth century.
Gatsby inevitably stands for the Dutch sailors, and Daisy stands for their
dream of the new world. The novel is a thick scaffolding of symbols. The
first and most important is that of the green light towards which Gatsby
stretches his hands in an attempt to catch it. It stands for the orgiastic
future that year by year recedes before the Americans. The second
important symbol is the valley of ashes which echoes Eliot's The Waste
Land. It is symbolic of the spiritual barrenness of the modern world. The
third symbol is the eyes of Dr. Eckelberg that stands for the ineffectual,
passive role of God in twentieth-century America. The fourth symbol is
that of bad driving and car accidents which are associated with all the
characters except for Nick. Music and songs are also used symbolically
or ironically in the novel. When Jordan tells Nick of the Gatsby/Daisy
relationship, we hear I'm the sheik of Araby. The irony here is that it is
Daisy (not Gatsby) who will creep to Gatsby's (not Daisy’s) tent
secretively. When they are united in Gatsby's house, we hear The Love
Nest. In the hotel we hear the wedding march, which reminds Daisy of
her marriage and bond to Tom. The clock and the significance of time
are also symbolic. Gatsby's attempt to transcend time is vain. One further
symbol is the Little Girl Bay in which Dan Cody drops anchor after
circling the continent. Cody and Gatsby lose everything for little girls:
the ironical rhyming Ella Kaye and Daisy Fay. The foul dust is symbolic
of the corrupt materialism that spoils the American dream.
Fitzgerald uses verbs, adjectives and adverbs skillfully in conveying his
intended meaning. Gatsby stretched his hand: the dream is great and far-
fetched. Daisy whispers enthusiastically, speaks genially, speaks in a
grave murmur, cries stormily or cynically. Her voice is sometimes
glowing and singing. She sobs with her voice muffled. When she
forgives, her voice is cold and the rancour is gone from it. When Tom

21
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

attacks Gatsby, the words seem to bite physically into him: the words
lean down over him.
The tempting notes of Daisy's voice cannot pass unnoticed. Her throat
tells of her joy. When she sings, her voice breaks up sweetly with the rise
of the melody, and each change tips out a little of her magic. She croons
to her bles—sed pre—cious daughter. Her voice struggles on through the
heat, beating against it, molding its senselessness into forms. Her voice
is full of money. This is the charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it,
the cymbal's song of it. When her anger cools down, her voice drops an
octave lower. When she and Gatsby speak alone, the murmur of their
voices rise and swell with gusts of emotion.
2 Research Questions and Statistical Analysis
2.1 Research Questions of the Study
In the above sections, the points of view discussed show how far The
Great Gatsby is a significant work of art and how much success
Fitzgerald achieved by way of style and technique. The style of this novel
has also been shown to be singularly persuasive, and this is a feat that is
most successfully conveyed by implication. The persuasive, mostly
lyrical style of the novel depends much on Nick's description of the
scenes and setting of the incidents. The use of language is remarkably
arresting. Description necessitates, as one of its primary tools, the
employment of adjectives. The stress in this paper is on Fitzgerald's use
of adjectives. The paper puts forward the following research questions
and tries to answer them.
If the novel is about magical transformation and the transfiguring of
money into love, if it juxtaposes status and aspirations, then in it there
must be two worlds: a concrete world of reality, and another of dreams
and fairies. If this is the case, then the material status of a character will
expectedly be associated with and expressed in adjectives that reinforce
this side of concreteness and materialism. Also, the dream-like nature of
the aspirations of a character will in turn be associated with and
expressed in adjectives that serve to underline this feature of the longed-
for hope. In other words, if the characters of the novel display different
values, or are variously distanced from, or absorbed in, the dream and

21
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

represent varying morals and values, this feature should be paralleled in

the diction.
The question that arises is: does the writer associate with each character
specific characteristics and, lexically speaking, a specific type of
adjectives that help the reader grasp his/her nature? If Daisy is the
butterfly soul and the objective-correlative of Gatsby's dream, does
Fitzgerald allocate more abstract than concrete values (and consequently
adjectives) to her character portrayal? If Myrtle is the bodily satisfaction
of the material character Tom, does Fitzgerald attach more concrete than
abstract qualities (and consequently adjectives) to her sensual pattern of
a character? Again, if Gatsby is neither wholly materialistic nor wholly
spiritual, if he attempts to transfigure money into love, or if he is morally
corrupt and socially outcast and despised by the old rich, and at the same
time more apt on this dream and more Platonic by way of his conception
of himself, does this duality of his character find parallelism of language
in a composite set of qualities (and consequently adjectives) suitable for
displaying the conflict he suffers from?
Stated more specifically, what are the fields in which these adjectives are
used with each character? Are there specific adjectives, or types of
adjectives, that are used with each character according to his/her distance
from, and belief in, the dream, according to the degree of his/her
indulgence in material life, or according to other characters' view of
him/her? These questions will hopefully be answered in the present
paper.
2.2 Statistical Analysis
For the purpose stated above, an extensive statistical account of the
adjectives in the novel was carried out. The adjectives were classified
into two types: concrete and abstract. The total number of adjectives
scrutinized is 2044. Of these 1133 (55.4%) are abstract adjectives and
911 (44.6%) concrete. Table and Chart 1 below show the figures and
percentages of these adjectives distributed according to their frequency
of occurrence correlated with the six main characters: Daisy Fay, Jordan
Baker, Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Tom Buchanan, and The Wilsons.

22
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Table 1. Adjectives vs. Characters

Abstract Concrete
Characters Total
Frequency % Frequency %
Daisy 192 68.6 88 31.4 280
Jordan 72 63.7 41 36.3 113
Gatsby 446 56.7 341 43.3 787
Nick 235 52.2 215 47.8 450
Tom 104 47.9 113 52.1 217
The Wilsons 84 42.6 113 57.4 197
Total 1133 55.4 911 44.6 2044

80
Chart 1. Adjectives vs. Characters

60

40

20

0
Daisy Jordan Gatsby Nick Tom The Wilsons
Abstract Concrete

Table 1 shows the abstract adjectives displayed in descending order and

the concrete adjectives in ascending order of frequency. Daisy, the object
of Gatsby's dream, at least in his and in Nick's eyes, has the highest
proportion of abstract adjectives. On the other hand, the Wilsons, mainly
Myrtle, have the highest proportion of concrete adjectives. Myrtle, the
object of Tom's sensual lust and of Nick's as well as the reader's despise,
is not worthy of any spiritual inspiration.
Jordan Baker, Daisy's friend and intimate high-class mate, is next to
Daisy with regard to the high proportion of abstract adjectives. To Nick,
she represents some kind of love and offers some degree of attraction,
though not complete. This distances her, as Gatsby's love distances
Daisy, from being physically attainable, grants her, as Gatsby's love
grants Daisy, more charm and makes her less tangible.
23
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Tom is next to the Wilsons in having more concrete than abstract

adjectives. This may explain his brutality and his body's enormous
leverage.
Daisy and Jordan are at one extreme of the continuum, and Tom and the
Wilsons are at the other. In between, Gatsby and Nick hover; they have
less abstract adjectives than Daisy and Jordan do. This may reinforce or
coincide with their aspirations towards joining the high class. They have
less concrete adjectives than Tom and the Wilsons. This may reflect
Gatsby's and Nick's attempts to detach themselves from the lowly sprees
of Tom and Myrtle. Gatsby and Nick look up to Daisy and Jordan, the
symbols of transcendence and inspiration, but look down upon Tom and
Myrtle, the symbols of brutality and faithlessness.
This may lead us to carry out a few modifications to table 1 above by
merging the figures and percentages to show our attitudes to, and ways
of, life rather than individual characters. Table and Chart 2 below show
the figures and percentages of Daisy and Jordan, those of Gatsby and
Nick, and those of Tom and The Wilsons are added in three groups, thus
showing the three attitudes to life.

Table 2: Adjectives vs. Attitudes

Abstract Concrete
Character Groups Total
Frequency % Frequency %
Daisy & Jordan 264 67.2 129 32.8 393
Gatsby & Nick 681 55.1 556 44.9 1237
Tom & The Wilsons 188 45.4 226 54.6 414

80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Daisy & Jordan Gatsby & Nick Tom & The Wilsons

24
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

The first attitude to life includes Daisy and Jordan. It reflects the position
of women in the 1920s. Women at that time depended for life on men,
who valued them according to their beauty and their ability to represent
men's aspirations. The other extreme on the continuum is reflected in
Tom and the Wilsons. They reflect the sensual aspect of extra-marital
relationship. They have less romantic aspirations than the remaining
characters do. The language they speak and the way they are spoken of
by others or by Nick the narrator reflects much indulgence on their part
in pastime secret meetings. The hard reality of Tom's character stands
out in contrast with Daisy's transparent, fairy character at least in
Gatsby's and Nick's eyes. Myrtle's low standing and material aspirations
show her as being sharply contrasted with Daisy and Jordan's society.
She is suffering both from her husband, who cannot afford her market-
place requirements, and from Tom, who humiliates her, beating her to
bleeding in their extra-marital flat.
In between these two extremes lies the attitude of Gatsby and Nick. They
are possessed by the dream of excellence, of becoming eminent people
in a material society, but are at the same time disinherited, barred from
that closed society of old money. This means that the complex composite
of abstract and concrete qualities they have reinforces the conflict
between their status, their actual stance on the one hand, and the
orgiastic, though deceptive, promise of life they are longing for, on the
other.
This overall account of the proportions of abstract and concrete
adjectives may seem to be over-simplified, though it is quite telling. In
the following sections, we shall for a closer outlook isolate at least one
character of each attitude (e.g., Daisy, Gatsby and Myrtle) and study it in
detail. We shall hopefully get a clearer insight into Fitzgerald's
craftsmanship and choice of lexis.
Following are four tables that show the fields of abstract and concrete
adjectives for (i) Daisy, the objective-correlative of the dream, (ii)
Myrtle, the sensual dream, (iii) Gatsby, the aspirant, and (iv) Mr. Wilson,
the weakling husband.

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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Table 3. Field Abstract Concrete Total

Daisy Misery 23 2 25
Instability 52 22 74
Hypocrisy 23 - 23
Beauty/Appearance 94 39 133
Wealth - 25 25

Table 4. Field Abstract Concrete Total

Gatsby Parties 78 61 139
Dream 187 144 331
Past 4 8 12
Wealth 44 116 160
Deservedness 61 9 70
Corruption 58 3 61
Attraction 14 - 14

Table 5. George Field Abstract Concrete Total

Wilson Poverty 7 9 16
Weakness 12 23 35
Revolt 16 16 32
Table 6. Myrtle Field Abstract Concrete Total
Wilson Aspiration 31 41 72
Dream 4 11 15
Body 9 11 20
Misery 5 2 7

Table 3 shows that, on the whole, the great majority of adjectives display
Daisy's beauty/appearance and her instability—the two main features
that reflect her character. It also shows that Daisy has more abstract than
concrete adjectives in three fields: her misery, her instability, and her
beauty/appearance. The proportions of abstract adjectives here are
considerably high. Moreover, it shows that she has only abstract
adjectives in the field of her hypocrisy and affectation, and only concrete
adjectives in the field of her wealth and material life.

26
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Table 4 shows that for Gatsby, there are more abstract than concrete
adjectives in the fields of his outrageous parties, his corruption, his
unattainable dream, and his reservedness and detachment from the
people around him. It also shows that there are, on the other hand, high
proportions of concrete adjectives in the fields of his massive wealth and
his starving past. In the field of his attraction, however, the adjectives are
only abstract. But on the whole the great majority of adjectives occur in
the fields of his parties, his dream, and his wealth.
Tables 5 and 6 show that the majority of adjectives occur in the fields of
Mr. Wilson's weakness, and his revolt and pre-meditated revenge, and in
the field of Myrtle's worldly aspirations. In Mr. Wilson's case, concrete
adjectives are mostly used in the field of his bodily weakness and
infirmity. In Myrtle's case, concrete adjectives outnumber abstract ones
in all except the field of her misery. Though the actual number of
adjectives here is small, seemingly insignificant on its own, it
contributes, in collaboration with other fields, to the total effect of her
character.
3 The Wilsons
3.1 Concrete Adjectives in Myrtle
Myrtle’s aspirations are reflected in more concrete than abstract
adjectives. We encounter her first in her spotted dress (spotted like her
morals) of dark-blue crepe-de-chine with which she attracts Tom.
Changing in a brown figured muslin, she goes with Tom and Nick in a
new taxi lavender-coloured with gray upholstery. We feel that she is now
on the move towards satisfying her material aspirations. The cheapness
and casualty of her affair with Tom is reflected in her requirements for
the pastime in the flat: a small flask of perfume, some cold ice- cream,
several old copies of Town Tattle, small scandal magazines, large hard
dog-biscuits and a collar of braided silver for the dog. Her mother's over-
enlarged photograph is like a hen sitting on a blurred rock, and her sister
wears innumerable pottery bracelets which produce incessant clicking.
These adjectives reflect her and her sister's yearning to abolish the
shameful past and to decorate the desolate present with cheep material
things. Her sister has a solid sticky bob of hair, a face powdered white
and eyebrows re-drawn at a more rakish angle, but she cannot combat
27
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

nature, which repeatedly restores the old alignment, leaving behind a

blurred face. The smoky air in the flat enhances the smoke of the valley
of ashes. Myrtle indulges in the smoke in the same way Gatsby aspires
to separate the dust that floats in the wake of his dreams. She identifies
herself with the smoke, now wearing an elaborate afternoon dress of
cream-coloured chiffon which expands with her body as if she were
turning on a noisy, creaking pivot. At the top of her false happiness, she
speaks to her sister in a high mincing shout. Now her warm breath tells
her story with Tom. Her confidence now encourages her to go as far as
planning to buy a black silk bow for her mother's grave, a hint at fixing
the past and obliterating symptoms of poverty and need. But when her
indulgence reaches an extreme point of planning for a future with Tom,
he breaks her nose and there are bloody towels, and a long broken wail
of pain is heard. When her husband locks her in, she cries in violent
racket.
One of the features of Fitzgerald's intricate style is that he sometimes
juxtaposes abstract and concrete adjectives within the same phrase. The
shrill metallic urgency of the telephone is associated with Myrtle's phone
calls in Tom's house. When she is drunk, the elaborate dress she wears
in the party is only a crazy old thing. She looks with eyes open with
jealous terror at Jordan, mistaking her for Daisy. When she is locked in,
she calls her husband in a loud, scalding voice. After her death, her
husband discovers a small expensive dog leash in one of the drawers.
This combination is significant. It reflects the two sides of Myrtle's
character: the sensual nature and objective-correlative of Tom's spree.
Her body receives suitable attention from Fitzgerald. The reader does not
fail to notice the concreteness of her body with its surplus flesh, thickish
figure, rather wide hips, or her mother the stout old lady, or even her
sister's solid sticky bob of hair and corrected brow. Again, the
amalgamation of abstract and concrete adjectives in describing her is
thematically significant. Her soft coarse voice characterizes her
ambivalent character. It is soft for Tom but course for her husband. Her
sister who is a slender worldly girl.

28
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

3.2 Abstract Adjectives in Myrtle

Fitzgerald beautifies Myrtle with some abstract qualities. These qualities
serve as a source of attraction for Tom and of aspiration for Mr. And
Mrs. McKee, the lower orders in her self-deceptive dream of being
sublime and transcendent. She throws a regal home-coming glance as
she arrives at the flat. The reader sees her adorable dress, brilliant smile,
artificial laughter, hears her violent and obscene words about her
husband and wonders at her desire to buy one of those cute little ashtrays
and at her impressive hauteur. When Tom breaks her nose, the reader
sympathizes with her falling despairing figure. In a slowly developing
picture, the familiar expression on her face becomes purposeless and
inexplicable when she follows Tom with eyes full of peculiar intensity,
mistaking Jordan for Daisy. Her husband believes that she is a deep
woman. Her sister is so familiar with Tom's flat that she moves about
with a proprietary haste, shows a surprising amount of character, and
looks with determined eyes when she denies any connection between the
deceased Myrtle and Gatsby.
Some abstract adjectives are employed in the description of myrtle's
body: her intense, immediately perceptible, panting, and tremendous
vitality. The significance of Myrtle lies in her body; that of Tom lies in
his cruel body. The association is now clear.
3.3 Concrete Adjectives in Mr. Wilson
When we see Wilson first, we do not mistake his weakness: his light-
blue eyes, his dark suit , his pale hair, his mingling with the cement
colour of the walls, his green face under the sun, his sick body, and his
wife's calling him dirty little coward. We also witness how this weakness
turns into rebellion when his wife is run over. We hear his gasping moan,
his high groaning words, his gasping cries, his incoherent muttering, and
his groaning voice.
3.4 Abstract Adjectives in Mr. Wilson
Abstract adjectives help draw Wilson's revolt against whoever ran over
his wife. After her murder, we hear the hollow, wailing sound of his
crying, the high horrible call, the half-knowing, half- bewildered look in
his eyes, the forlorn hope of receiving any help, his glazed eyes. We also
read in the newspapers of a man deranged by grief who acts sort of crazy
29
 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

and whose figure is ashen and fantastic when he was lying in ambush to
kill Gatsby.
4 Daisy
4.1 Abstract Adjectives in Daisy
4.1.1 Abstract Adjectives and Daisy's Beauty/Appearance
The angel-like sketch Fitzgerald presents for Daisy in Chapter One
shows Nick's admiration of Daisy, a point of view that creeps softly to
the reader's mind through the employment of abstract adjectives. We are
told of her conscientious and awed expression, her charming murmur,
her absurd, charming little laugh, her lovely face, her sad and lovely face,
the gay, exciting things she does and expects to do all the time, the
singing compulsion and the whispered "Listen" that men cannot forget
about her voice, the romantic affection of her face, her thrilling voice,
her passionate mouth, the excited officers who seek her love, her stirring
warmth, her breathless, thrilling words, the lovely shape of her lovely
face, the distinguished, secret society she belongs to, and the flower-like
way she poses.
In Chapter Four we learn of the hushed, fascinated way Jordan looks at
the relationship between Daisy and her husband, the perfect reputation
she had after her marriage in Chicago, and the strangest voice she spoke
in when she first heard of Gatsby's return.
Before she meets Gatsby in Chapter Five, she bears a bright, ecstatic
smile, and the exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic. Her voice
becomes enchanting murmurs and a deathless song when, together with
her well-loved eyes and her astounding presence, she shows her
admiration of Gatsby's house.
When she attends Gatsby's party In Chapter Six, she plays murmurous
tricks with her voice, a husky rhythmic whisper, and displays her warm,
human magic. She gives Tom her little gold pencil to take down any
addresses. The memory Gatsby has of her in the past is her perishable
breath, her full life, and her charming voice.
In Chapter Seven, she has a sweet, exciting laugh, and her indiscreet
voice (full of money) has an inexhaustible charm. Even the fans in her
house send a singing breeze. After the unwanted encounter between Tom
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and Gatsby, that lost voice and those frightened eyes of hers are all that
Gatsby can find.
In Chapter Eight, Daisy's old, dreamy world is delineated from Gatsby's
memories. We are told of the first nice girl Gatsby ever met, a girl who
is excitingly desirable, with her curious and lovely mouth, a girl about
whose mysterious and gay house there are gay and radiant activities, a
ripe mystery, not musty romances, scarcely withered flowers, vibrant
emotions, a bright porch, and breathless intensity. She is safe and proud
away from the hot struggles of the poor in the bought luxury of her world,
which is redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery.
4.1.2 Abstract Adjectives and Daisy's Instability
In her attempt to show that she belongs to Tom's world, Daisy is
criticized for her basic insincerity. But Tom is worried that she might
have had a little heart-to-heart talk with Nick about their married life.
Although she loves Gatsby, she experiences unfathomable delight in the
beginning of her married life. In her first meeting with Gatsby after their
long parting, she is frightened but graceful and her voice shows
unexpected, joy and an aching, grieving beauty. Her fear, affirmed Nick
to Gatsby, means that she is just embarrassed. When Gatsby shows her
around his house, she could not hide her admiration of his huge house.
Near the end of her first visit, Gatsby seems to be held most with the
fluctuating, feverish warmth of her voice. In Gatsby's party, she feels the
raw vigour of the West Egg society, so she tries to invade its world with
a green card for anybody to kiss her. Her jealousy about Gatsby is clear
in her doubt that some unbelievable guest, some radiant girl, who with
one fresh glance, one moment of magical encounter, in the dim,
incalculable hours, rips her of those romantic possibilities that are absent
from her world. The song accompanying Daisy's leaving the party is a
neat, sad, little waltz. Daisy becomes a low, vulgar girl in the eyes of
Jordan when she dares kiss Gatsby during her husband's short absence.
She regards her own daughter as an absolute, little dream and is so
confused. Before the encounter, her secretive affair is as secure and
inviolate as Myrtle's own. In the hotel, filling the room with the thrilling
scorn of her voice, she endeavours to put an end to the personal remarks
between Tom and Gatsby by drawing Tom's attention to talking about
his casual little spree. Then, with perceptible reluctance, half-intoxicated
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with love, she confesses she never loved Tom. She is terrified during the
encounter and nervous after she had to make her fatal choice. During
Gatsby's long absence, Daisy tries to forget her nervous despair with
fresh faces, a wild crowd, and the new tunes wailing the hopeless
comment of songs, receiving at the gray tea hour guests with whose low,
sweet fever her house throbbed. In this twilight universe, there is a
certain struggle which Daisy transforms with unquestionable practicality
into a certain relief by accepting Tom.
4.1.3 Abstract Adjectives and Daisy's Hypocrisy
Daisy has, like Jordan, the habit of talking in a convinced way with a
bantering inconsequence that is cool, of looking with impersonal eyes,
smiling an absolute smirk, and making a polite, pleasant effort to
entertain or to be entertained. Daisy escapes from her material
surroundings by commenting on the romantic, the very romantic scenery
outdoors. When she is reunited with Gatsby in Nick's house, her voice
becomes an artificial note. She speaks to the driver in a grave murmur.
Compared with Daisy's artificial world, West Egg is something awful,
an unprecedented place because of the old euphemisms and the obtrusive
fate that combines these people in the party. Daisy speaks hypocritically
to her well-disciplined, blessed, precious child, Pammy, who gives the
guests a reluctant hand to shake and gives her mother a reluctant glance
as she is led by the nurse out of the room. In Gatsby's eyes, Daisy is the
golden girl.
4.1.4 Abstract Adjectives and Daisy's Misery
Daisy finds her life vacuous of every real meaning. She waits in vain for
the longest day in summer but ironically misses it. She experiences
unthoughtful sadness and turbulent emotions, trying to suppress her tense
gaiety. The sun sets, leaving on her countenance a look of lingering
regret like that on the faces of children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
She has a very bad time with her husband, and is pretty cynical about
everything. She seizes the chance of a momentary interruption in her
husband's presence to impart her feelings to Nick. She wakes up of the
labour ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, with the belief that the
best thing a girl can be is a beautiful little fool. When she has doubts that
her husband is talking to his mistress on the telephone, she speaks in a
defiant way, she laughs with thrilling scorn, she is sophisticated, so
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sophisticated, she tries to exact a contributory emotion from Nick. Her

doubts are dispelled by Tom as foolish ideas. In the miserable encounter
between Tom and Gatsby, she admits in a pitiful voice that she cannot
deny her love for Tom.
4.2 Concrete Adjectives in Daisy
4.2.1 Concrete Adjectives and Daisy's Beauty/Appearance
Daisy's beauty can be seen from the beginning of the novel. Daisy and
Jordan are buoyed up on a coach as though upon an anchored balloon.
We can see her bright eyes, her face with bright things in it, her little
finger, her low, husky voice, her bright mouth and her glowing face.
Young officers seek her privilege. She comes to Nick's house in her white
car, her white roadster. We can see a damp streak of hair like a dash of
blue paint on her cheek, and the glistening drops of rain on her hand. We
can hear her strained voice when she sees Gatsby's pile of clothes. Her
happiness is reflected in her admiration of the pink clouds that she sees
during her actual presence in Gatsby's house. We can see her white face,
which bends into the single wrinkle of her small white neck, the flash of
her waving hand, the tiny gust of air that rises from her bosom, her dark
shining hair, and the pink glow of her bedroom. On the coach, Daisy and
Jordan sit like silver idols in their white dresses.
4.2.2 Concrete Adjectives and Daisy's Wealth
The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belongs to Daisy
Fay's house. She has a little white roadster. Before her bridal dinner, she
lies like a flower in her flowered dress. When she goes to Nick's house,
she has her large open car, she wears a three-cornered lavender hat, and
a dress with two rows of brass buttons. She has a dilatory limousine, and
carries a gold pencil for taking down notes. Her daughter is looked after
by a freshly laundered nurse. Daisy and Jordan wear small tight hats of
metallic cloth and carry light capes. Daisy's house is a white palace. Her
family's is such a beautiful house in the eyes of Gatsby, a rich house with
beautiful and cool bedrooms. Its guests come in shining motor cars, and
wear golden and silver slippers that shuffle the shining dust. In the end
of the novel, she vanishes in her rich life, leaving Gatsby behind.

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4.2.3 Concrete Adjectives and Daisy's Instability

After Gatsby's departure, Daisy goes with a fast, young, rich, and slightly
older crowd, a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men. When she
receives Gatsby's letter during the wedding party, she cries so much that
they put her in a cold bath where the letter is squeezed up into a wet ball.
When she attends Gatsby's party, she is jealous of the mere thought that
some young girl may win his heart. When she misses Tom at the
beginning of their married life, her face wears the most abstracted
expression. When she meets Gatsby in Nick's house, she sits on a stiff
chair. In order to curb the tension between Tom and Gatsby, she asks the
former to make them a cold drink and proposes that they all have cold
baths because it is so hot, too hot to fuss. She speaks of her daughter's
old yellow hair. In the fatal encounter between Tom and Gatsby, she
lights a cigarette with a trembling hand, throws the burning match on the
carpet, and speaks with a visible effort.
5. Jay Gatsby
5.1 Abstract Adjectives in Jay Gatsby
In the portrayal of Gatsby's character, Fitzgerald employs more abstract
than concrete adjectives. But in comparison to Daisy, the proportion of
abstract adjectives here is lower.
5.1.1 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby's Corruption
Abstract adjectives are frequent in respect to the corruption of Gatsby’s
character. The reader is reminded of the corruption of the dream
characterized by foul dust that floats in it. Nick has an unaffected scorn
for Gatsby's character. After his experience with the dilemma of Gatsby's
dream, he is no more interested in such abortive sorrows or short-winded
elations of men as those of Gatsby's. His corruption raises his guests'
romantic speculations and doubts about the sources of his wealth. In his
attempt to win Nick to his side, he pleads Nick not to get the wrong idea
or listen to the bizarre accusations that hover over his character and that
incur divine retribution. To Nick, there is no particular wonder that a
man like Gatsby could happen in a corrupt world. Gatsby's acquaintance
with Wolfsheim sheds light on his corrupt character. Wolfsheim lapses
into somnambulatory abstraction about his and Gatsby's connection
forgetting the mere existence of Nick when the three gather in the
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restaurant. Wolfsheim tells us of the funny look in the eyes of the waiter
as he called Rosenthal out for the man who shot him in his full belly. It
is a world of intrigue that Gatsby got acquainted with Wolfsheim in. The
somnambulatory abstraction soon changes when Wolfsheim wrongly
takes Nick for their new man. Wolfsheim now turns to Nick in an
interested way. When the food comes in, he forgets his more sentimental
atmosphere of past memories and begins to eat with relish.
Wolfsheim sees in Gatsby, he tells Nick, a fine fellow, a perfect
gentleman of fine breeding. He speaks of him in a gratifying way. But
when Gatsby dies, Wolfsheim does not attend the funeral because he
does not want to get mixed up in it. Wolfsheim's baseness brings Gatsby's
character into question because he is a member in an inevitable chain of
corrupt people, a smart man. When Gatsby offers Nick a chance of
making some money, he speaks of a rather confidential sort of thing, a
secretive business. Gatsby's previous life in a boat is rumoured as a
persistent story over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. There he
meets Dan Cody, from whom he inherits money and learns how to make
it. Great is the effect of Dan Cody with an infinite number of women and
the savory ramifications of one of them to separate him from his money.
Great again is the effect of Dan Cody with the turgid journalism about
him when he coasted along all too hospitable shores of little Girl Bay.
Here we note the symbolism of a “Little Girl” in the destiny of both Dan
Cody and Jay Gatsby. We also note the rhyming women's names “Daisy
Fay” and “Ella Kaye.” Dan Cody, the pioneer debauchee and Gatsby's
spiritual father, put more confidence in Gatsby in his sobriety so as for
Gatsby to tolerate his lavish doings when he gets drunk. Gatsby does not
learn drinking from Dan Cody; he gets his singularly appropriate
education of money making from him. He does not indulge in his gay
parties. Gatsby tells Nick his story in order to explode the wild rumours
about his origin. Tom sees in Gatsby one of the newly rich people, the
big bootleggers, Gatsby doubts that Nick sees in him some kind of cheap
sharper. When Gatsby changes his servants after his reunion with Daisy,
the new servants reply to visitors in a dilatory grudging way. The
newspaper reports after Gatsby's murder are for Nick grotesque,
circumstantial, eager and untrue.

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5.1.2 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby's Attraction

The attraction of Gatsby's character is reinforced by abstract adjectives.
Gatsby's personality is to Nick an unbroken series of successful gestures.
There is something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity that
has nothing to do with the flabby impressionability or the creative
temperament. It is an extraordinary gift, a romantic readiness for hope.
His leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet add to his
Platonic conception of himself.
5.1.3 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby's Dream
The majority of adjectives used in respect to Gatsby’s dream are abstract.
He has a romantic readiness; he is after a share of the local heavens in
West Egg. Though East Eggers mix with West Eggers in Gatsby's party,
they are on guard against the spectroscopic gaiety of West Eggers and of
Gatsby. Gatsby's love is, in the eyes of Jordan, the most amazing thing,
it is simply amazing. Gatsby suffers from the sudden emptiness and the
complete isolation of being left behind after his party; his dream is shared
with him by none at all. When he asks Nick to arrange for Daisy's
meeting, we see the impatient opening and closing of his hand, and we
understand his urgent invitation of Nick to use his beach. Then comes
the disconcerting ride in which Gatsby unfolds his secret to Nick. He
talks about that sudden extinction of his clan, and about war which could
have been a great relief of his unfortunate enchanted life. He opens a
chest of rubies to ease his broken heart.
Nick thinks that Gatsby's having a house across the bay from Daisy's
house is merely a strange coincidence, but after Jordan's explanation, this
purposeless splendor of Gatsby shows how he worked up to it in an
elaborate way. Gatsby waits for Nick's agreement to arrange for the
meeting with suppressed eagerness. He waits for Daisy, looking with
vacant eyes through a magazine. When she is late, he speaks in an
uncertain voice about his intention to leave, looking at his watch as if
there is some pressing demand on him. When Daisy arrives, he looks at
her with distraught eyes, then with tense, unhappy eyes. Then he feels it
is a terrible mistake, a terrible, terrible mistake to reunite with her this
funny way. When he takes her to his house and shows her his possessions,
he looks at them in a dazed way. Her presence in his house is the funniest
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

thing to him; he experiences an unreasoning joy. His teeth were set at an

inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now the colossal significance of the
green light vanishes when he discovers the great distance that separates
them as the enchanted objects of dream now diminish by one: Daisy.
Then comes a moment of profound human change. Gatsby begins to have
a faint doubt as to his happiness in her presence. She tumbles short of his
dreams because the colossal vitality of his illusions are possessed by
intense life. He throws himself with a creative passion into these illusions
that he beautifies with every bright feather stored up in his ghostly heart.
Gatsby is his own Platonic conception of himself; he has an
overwhelming self-absorption, an ineffable gaudiness.
Every night the moon soaks Gatsby’s clothes with wet light, and his eyes
close upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace of excellence.
These reveries are a satisfactory hint of his self- deception; he is
dismayed by the ferocious indifference of Minnesota to his own feelings
of loss when he comes back to discover that Daisy was gone. What could
he do when his parents are shiftless and unsuccessful farm people, when
he has to go through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of those days? He has
in his heart a constant, turbulent riot, and is haunted by the most
grotesque and fantastic conceits at night. Here is his transformation. He
takes a brand new name after his experience with Dan Cody, the man
with the hard empty face whom he served with a vague personal
capacity.
In Daisy's eyes, his next party is a ghostly celebrity. The guests'
movement is an indefinite procession of shadows. They are as unreal as
Gatsby's character or his dream, as fruitless as the five year unwavering
devotion. When she leaves, he suffers from unutterable depression. His
visions were unutterable when he first knew her; he experiences a
mysterious excitement when he thinks he won her heart, he would gulp
down the incomparable milk of wonder. He talks to Nick in an appalling
sentimentality about the old love-story.
When Nick and Gatsby are invited to Daisy's house, the latter's eyes are
fascinated; he speaks with visible tension. When they leave for town,
Tom's suggestion of exchanging the cars is distasteful to Gatsby. In the
confrontation scene in the hotel, Gatsby tells Tom that Daisy's marriage
to him is a terrible mistake, he is vivid with excitement. After Tom's
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attack on Gatsby for his presumptuous little flirtations of her, Daisy

draws further into herself, and Gatsby gives up. But the dead dream
fights on, though Daisy and Gatsby's meeting is accidental, isolated in
the car home. After Myrtle's murder, Gatsby waits hiding in Daisy's
garden in a despicable position for fear that Tom might bother her. The
morning after the accident, Gatsby is heavy with dejection, in his dark
house now we see the ghostly piano and the inexplicable amount of dust.
Gatsby clutches to some last hope of winning Daisy back. Jay Gatsby
has broken against Tom's malice, and the long secret extravaganza (love)
has been played out. In various unrevealed capacities, Gatsby has come
in contact with the Fays (the rich) but always with indiscernible barbed
wire between. He knows he has no comfortable family. She could have
been attracted to his non-existent phantom millions, his false pretences,
or the invisible cloak of his military uniform. Now he knows that his
presence in her house five years ago is only a colossal accident, he is
breathless. The tranquil night gives them a deep memory for the long
parting that was to come, and daisy yields herself to him in a long silent
embrace. The morning after the accident, ghostly birds begin to sing.
Gatsby's curious remark “it was just personal” astonishes Nick as a
romantic feat that Gatsby shows. He remembers the days he was looking
for Daisy in a miserable but irresistible journey when he came back from
the war. He looked at unfamiliar buildings with blurred eyes when the
freshest and best part of it had gone. Gatsby, in Nick's opinion, is worth
the whole damn bunch put together for he alone has an incorruptible
dream. Gatsby pays a high price for living with a single dream; he loses
the old warm world. On his way to his destined death, he must have
looked at an unfamiliar sky, through the frightening leaves, grotesque
roses, and the raw sunlight. It must have been a new world, material but
not real, where poor ghosts drift fortuitously about. After Gatsby's death
the accidental burden (his body) is carried, like his dream, by an
accidental course. The fresh flow of water urges its way, and Gatsby is
replaced by the hard reality. A detective with the adventitious authority
of his voice speaks in positive manner about the mad man who killed
Gatsby then himself. Wolfsheim's response is that the murder of Gatsby
is one of the most terrible shocks, a mad act. But he cannot attend the
funeral, he adds in hasty addenda, because he has some very important
business, and he does not feel secure in these hick towns. Gatsby's aged
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father does not have that ghastly surprise over his son's death; he knew
early that his son would have a big future. Nick feels a certain shame
that nobody comes to the funeral. Even Wolfsheim, Gatsby's closest
friend, responds unexpectedly in a reverent voice, saying that it is a bad
time for all. His father's eyes blink in a worried uncertain way over the
coffin. Gatsby, like the early Dutch sailors, must have been compelled
into an aesthetic contemplation of the temptation of the orgiastic future
that had slid back in that vast obscurity of darkness and the inessential
houses of the city. Nick pays a last visit to that huge incoherent failure
of a house, hears the faint incessant music and laughter of the parties,
and experiences the transitory enchanted moment in which all men hold
their breath in the presence of the attractive, rather deceptive continent.
5.1.4 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby's Parties
The majority of adjectives used in respect to Gatsby’s parties are
abstract. His parties are characterized by massive spending. We have
eight servants and an extra gardener. Five crates of oranges and lemons
arrive. Floating rounds of cocktail permeate the garden. The orchestra is
a whole pit. There are casual innuendo and introductions. Strangers have
enthusiastic meetings and burst into laughter at a cheerful word. There
are new arrivals. Confident girls become for a sharp, joyous moment the
center of attention. There is a momentary hush as an erroneous piece of
news goes around. There are also three married couples. For some, the
party offers a dignified homogeneity and represents the staid nobility.
But there are eternal graceless circles of dancers, a celebrated tenor and
a notorious contralto singing, happy vacuous bursts of laughter at the
slightest provocation, many-coloured, many-keyed commotions, and
uncontrollable laughter. The scene becomes significant, elemental and
profound.
The orchestra leader smiles with jovial condescension and talks of the
big sensation his music produces. Near the end of the party the girls put
their head on men's shoulders in a puppyish convivial way, the confused
and intriguing sounds of the guests can be heard, and a lady from a
famous chorus sings to the music of the piano. At the humorous
suggestion that the lady sings the notes on her face, she suddenly goes
off into a deep, vinous sleep. A man talks with curious intensity to young
women. His wife, who is at intervals like an angry diamond, fails to laugh
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at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way. Wayward and sober

men do not want to go back home but highly indignant wives force them
to do so.
The car with the amputated wheel gets attention from half a dozen
curious chauffeurs, and there is a violent confusion resulting from the
harsh discordant din from those in the rear. The poor driver does not
realize that the wheel is amputated. There is an awed hush after
somebody’s explanation to the bad driver. There is a ghostly pause. The
wonder is that this scene symbolizes Gatsby's dilemma. Daisy is the
amputated wheel of his life, but he does not understand that. The driver
takes a long breath, then in a determined voice makes the wrong
suggestion. Gatsby's guests pay him the subtle tribute of knowing
nothing about him. Some of them are theatrical people; others have
melodious names of flowers.
5.1.5 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby's Reservedness
When Nick first saw Gatsby, he wanted to introduce himself to him but
Gatsby gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone.
Gatsby’s invitation to Nick is a surprisingly formal note signed in a
majestic hand about the peculiar combination of circumstances that
prevented any previous calling. In the party, Gatsby apologizes for not
being a very good host. His are rare smiles that give eternal reassurance,
face the whole external world, then concentrate on you with an
irresistible prejudice in your favour. At this point, the smiles vanish
leaving behind an elaborate formality. Nick has a strong impression that
Gatsby picks his words with care. Gatsby looks at his guests with
approving eyes but does not mix with the fraternal hilarity of the party.
This reservedness slowly changes into a familiar expression on his face
as he confirms his date with Nick, but there is a pleasant significance in
his apparent desire to be among the last to go, although he was not
among them during the party most of the time. Gatsby always balances
himself in a punctilious manner when he is standing. Nick's first
impression of him is that of a person of some undefined consequence
who picks elegant sentences. A strained, unfamiliar look of
embarrassment comes over Gatsby's face as he meets Tom in the
restaurant. Gatsby has the ability to hide his torture though he looks

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toward the windows in Nick's house as if a series of invisible but

alarming happenings were taking place outside. He makes a nervous
circuit around the house to avoid her coming in. In the beginning of their
reunion, Gatsby reclines against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit
of perfect ease; he is not really at ease. His lips part with an abortive
attempt at a laugh. Gatsby experiences an immediate alarm as Nick goes
out leaving him alone with Daisy; he speaks in a miserable way. The
awkward situation he is now in is a terrible mistake, a terrible, terrible
mistake. But Nick believes he is just embarrassed. Gatsby looks at him
with unforgettable reproach. Even in daisy's presence, he does not give
Nick an appropriate reply when he inquires about his business. Nick
swears that he heard the ghostly laughter of the owl-eyed man. This hints
at Gatsby's secretivity. After a confused five minutes, the reporter says
that out of laudable initiative, he comes in a random shot to see what is
beyond Gatsby. Gatsby learns from Dan Cody how to draw the vague
contour of Jay Gatsby. Even his only dance with Daisy is a graceful,
conservative fox-trot. The association of Gatsby with the fox cannot pass
unnoticed. When he is reunited with Daisy, he employs an unfamiliar
butler with a villainous face and orders moderate supplies of food. The
neighbours now believe that the new people are not servants at all. Daisy
regards Gatsby as being so cool, so cool, because, unlike her, he does not
dare kiss her. When Gatsby is insinuated at by Tom, his anger and
dissatisfaction are not easily read in his face. An indefinite expression,
definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, passes over his face.
When Tom faces him with his connection with Wolfsheim, the
unfamiliar, yet recognizable look is back on his face. When Nick praises
him, that radiant and understanding smile which tells of ecstatic cahoots
between them comes back to his face.
5.1.6 Abstract Adjectives and Gatsby's Wealth
The majority of adjectives used in relation to Gatsby's wealth are mainly
concrete. There are some abstract adjectives, though. Gatsby is one of
the solid prosperous Americans, a member of the society of easy money.
His library has an important-looking door, and inside, the owl-eyed man
looks at the shelves with unsteady concentration in admiration. Gatsby's
is a gorgeous car, with a rich cream colour, a monstrous length, and
triumphant hat-boxes. When Gatsby invites Wolfsheim, the Jew eats
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with ferocious delicacy. His guests are casual moths in a wild rout. They
are interesting, celebrated people doing interesting things. Daisy
admires the sparkling odour of the jonquils, the frothy odour of
hawthorns, and the pale gold odour of kiss-me-at-the-gate. Daisy
admires his such beautiful shirts, such—such beautiful shirts. The
sparkling hundreds of guests come to his house at twilight to enjoy the
inevitable swimming party. His father is astonished with awed pride at
his great rooms, and the pretty picture of his house.
5.2 Concrete Adjectives in Jay Gatsby
In the portrayal of Gatsby's character, there are more concrete adjectives
than in Daisy’s. Concrete adjectives are used most frequently in respect
to his wealth, his parties, and his dream
5.2.1 Concrete Adjectives and Gatsby's Wealth
Concrete adjectives are mainly connected with Gatsby's wealth. His
house is a colossal affair, a factual imitation of Norman palaces, with a
thin beard of raw ivy and a marble swimming pool. The symbolism in
factual imitation is clear; it suggests the unreality of Gatsby's whole
existence. We read of Gatsby's blue and enormous gardens, the marble
steps of his house, his brisk yellow bug, his chauffeur's uniform of robin's
egg blue, and the new gas-blue evening gown with lavender beads he
bought for one of his female guests. The first supper is served, and there
would be another one before midnight. We go into his high Gothic
library, with its great table, paneled with carved English oak. Before
Nick sees Gatsby, he imagines him to be a florid corpulent person.
Gatsby's rooms are large, many-windowed; his doors are great; his
garden is still glowing even after the rise of the moon. We see his crystal
glass service, his elaborate roadhouse, his car, which has many layers of
glass like a green leather conservatory, and his caramel-coloured suit.
His oxford medal has an authentic look and carries in a circular legend
Gatsby's name; his chest of rubies with their crimson-lighted depths
eases his heart. His overpopulated lawn and his splendid car are sources
of attraction. In a well-fanned cellar (restaurant), he orders succulent
hash for his invitees. In comparison with Nick's garden, Gatsby's is
darker, well-kept. He decorates Nick's house for meeting Daisy with
innumerable receptacles, putting on a white flannel-suit, a silver shirt and
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a gold-coloured tie for her. During their meeting inside, Nick

contemplates Gatsby's enormous house with a large central bay and gray
windows. Gatsby shows Daisy his house, every arched door, square
tower; the bedrooms swath in rose and lavender silk and are vivid with
new flowers. They go through the big postern. Daisy admires this feudal
silhouette; on the marble steps there are no bright dresses (of servants).
The bathrooms are vivid with sunken baths. Gatsby shows Daisy his
massed suits, his shirts of sheer linen, thick silk, fine flannel, shirts with
stripes and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint
orange. She sobs with a voice muffled in the thick folds of these shirts.
Gatsby's bright door sends light late at night through the darkness and
his guests who rouge and powder before an invisible glass flow out.
Daisy glances at the lighted top of his steps while leaving, and the guests
run up from the black beach. When the journey to the town comes,
Gatsby offers that they all go in his car with its hot green leather seats.
The combination of the adjectives here symbolizes the test his wealth
will undergo. His car has an unfamiliar gear; the switch between past and
present is easy. Michaelis is the only witness who catches sight of a light-
green car in the dark, a big yellow new car, a yellow car. The luminosity
of Gatsby's pink suit in Daisy's garden is the only thing Nick can see in
the darkness. It symbolizes the unending pursuit of the dream. The few
last things Nick remembers of Gatsby are his gorgeous pink rag of a suit,
the white steps of his house, and the yellow car with the front right fender
needing repair. Towards his tragic death in his own pool, Gatsby
shoulders his pneumatic mattress that used to amuse his guests. His
wealth accompanies him right to the end, but it fails to meet his needs
because it is as hollow as his mattress.
5.2.2 Concrete Adjectives and Gatsby's Parties
There are less concrete than abstract adjectives in respect to his parties.
These concrete adjectives reflect the fulfillment of the material aspects
of these lavish parties. His guests enjoy the sun on the hot sand of his
beach. A pyramid of pulpess halves of lemons and oranges leaves his
back door after each party. There are spiced baked hams, glistening hors
d'oeuvre, and dark gold turkeys. The bar is in full swing. Sound and sight
effects are rich. There are low and high drums, enough-coloured lights
and primary colours. There are many young single female guests. The
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

guests glide under the constantly changing light. Some of them wear
trembling colours. The drift of the whole party is reflected in these
changing states and is reinforced by verbs of movement. Ironically
Gatsby calls his a little party. Two female guests wear twin yellow
dresses. This fateful colour is the colour of the death car. The girls like
his large parties because they find enough privacy. A tall red-haired
young lady sings with gasping broken sobs in a quavering soprano. Her
tears come into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes assuming an
inky colour and forming slow black rivulets.
Each guest is indulged in his own way in the party. The party reflects
individual attitudes. The men do not want to go home and the wives
sympathize with each other in slightly raised voices. The sharp jut of a
wall that amputates the car's wheel represents the sharp halt of the present
that hinders Gatsby's progression towards the future. The pale dangling
man who drives the car represents Gatsby. Neither the driver nor Gatsby
knows what is wrong or attempts to solve the problem the right way.
These gleaming, dazzling parties remained in Nick's memory. They were
unforgettable.
Sometimes abstract and concrete adjectives are brought together. So in
Gatsby's parties we hear yellow cocktail music, the stiff, tinny drip of the
banjoes, and the bizarre and tumultuous scene of the car with the
detached wheel. Among the guests, we encounter a rowdy little girl, a
massive, lethargic woman, and a man with a large uncertain dancing
shoe. Gatsby's eyes are bright and tired at the end of the party.
5.2.3 Concrete Adjectives and Gatsby's Dream
With respect to Gatsby's dream, there are less concrete than abstract
adjectives. The romantic nature of the dream is far less tangible than he
would imagine. Because the means he uses to attain his dream is
corrupt—and he has no other means—the employment of concrete
adjectives becomes indispensable. The first time Nick sees him, Gatsby,
hands in pockets, regarding the silver pepper of the stars, is seen
stretching his arms toward the dark water, toward a single green light,
minute and far away. His tanned skin and his short hair were
characteristic features of his general appearance. The absence of any
physical bond between his guest's car and its amputated wheel

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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

symbolizes Gatsby's bond with Daisy, the object of the dream. Daisy is
not only socially far above him, but also physically bound to Tom
through marriage and through their daughter. The gray names of
Gatsby's guests on Nick's old time-table show the irrelevance of his
dream.
Gatsby's alleged descent from some wealthy people and his life like a
young rajah do not conceal the turbaned character he has. The absence
of symmetry and harmony in Gatsby's dream is reflected even in the face
of his friend Wolfsheim with his small flat nose, large head, tiny eyes,
and the fine growths of hair in his nostrils. Gatsby's corrupt means are
reflected in Wolfsheim's cuff buttons that are oddly familiar pieces of
ivory, of human molars. In Nick's house, while waiting for Daisy,
Gatsby, pale with dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes, peers
toward the bleared windows. Gatsby, pale as death, speaks to Daisy in a
choking murmur and catches the falling clock with trembling hands. His
ability to fix the past is ridiculed in his forgetfulness of the clock that tilts
dangerously over his head. The black wreath on the door of Gatsby's
house before he buys it and the decline of the previous owner are bad
omens; they foretell Gatsby's failure. Gatsby's feelings, like an
overwound clock, run down as he watches the reaction of the grandeur
of his house on Daisy's face. The simplest room is his bedroom, the
symbol of reproduction and regeneration. His romantic view of life does
not outlive time; rather, it is destroyed at the hands of time. His dream
cannot beget real happiness. Gatsby and Daisy's reunion is out of time.
Thus, the sky begins to rain; the corrugated surface of the water
symbolizes their stone-littered path that awaits them. The mist now
makes the green light visible no more. The mist is that of the funny
present that foretells a dim future. In this dim present, objects become
indefinite; the dream is blurred out. Gatsby does not come from the
womb of nothingness; he is a product of Dan Cody's education. Hanging
on the wall there is a large photograph of an elderly man (Dan Cody) in
yachting costume; on the bureau there is a small picture of Gatsby in
yachting costume as well. The size and the position of each picture show
Dan Cody as a model, an ideal forerunner for Gatsby in deed. The
infirmity of the present happiness is reflected in Klipspringer's scanty
blonde hair and nebulous trousers. Gatsby turns on a solitary lamp, which

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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

suggests his living on a single dream. He lights Daisy's cigarette with a

trembling hand. It is a twilight effect: there is no light except what the
gleaming floor reflects from the hall. Gatsby doubts his present
happiness as he experiences a profound change. Gatsby's past is so poor:
a torn green jersey, tangled clothes, canvas pants, and a brown,
hardening body. But he has contempt for young virgins for their
ignorance. His poverty is the underlying incentive towards an orgiastic
dream of betterment. He sets out for his future glory, looking up at the
railed deck and admiring Cody's silver fields of Nevada. Cody, the gray
florid man who adopts Gatsby and buys him white duck trousers and a
blue coat, previously brought violence to the frontier brothel and saloon.
These concrete means of fulfilling Gatsby's dreams represent the starting
point of his romantic launch towards an unattainable dream. In his
parties, he lets liquor alone; his guests need a cold shower to come back
to sobriety. They are drunk with wine; he with illusion. When Daisy fails
to understand, he loses control of himself, walking up and down a
desolate path of discarded favours and crushed flowers. Their
acquaintance five years ago still tempts him. The cool night, the quiet
lights, and the sidewalk white with moonlight, all bewitch him. The
corruption of his means is hinted at by the babbled slander in his garden
about his supposed murder of a man. After the confrontation and the
accident, the walls of Gatsby's house become dark, the rooms musty, and
in the humidor there are stale dry cigarettes. No matter how glorious his
dreams are in the beginning, he was a penniless young man. The cold fall
night and the long, silent embrace signify the long parting that is to come.
The gray-turning, gold- turning light of the morning after the accident
flickers as a sign of the halt, the cessation of movement, the final
destruction of the hero. The loss that Gatsby experiences when he comes
back only to find that Daisy is gone is behind his search for her
everywhere. He searches for her in the out-of-the-way places, in hot day
coaches or in open vestibules sitting on a folding chair, hoping to catch
glimpse of her in a possible yellow trolley in the spring fields in the
vanishing city. Nick's admiration of Gatsby and final compliment “you're
worth the whole damn hunch put together” coincides with his description
of Gatsby in a pink suit as a bright spot of light against the white steps.
This bright spot, Gatsby at his highest point of attraction, will not
continue to be as bright; when he is murdered, there is a thin (not bright)
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

red circle of blood that follows his body in the water. Gatsby's end is
paralleled in the response of cosmic phenomena. Shouldering his
mattress, Gatsby disappears (like his dream) among the yellowing trees,
through the scarcely created grass while his murderer glides towards him
through the amorphous trees. The faint, barely perceptible movement of
the water carrying the laden mattress and followed by that thin red circle
of blood represents the inevitable progression of time and contravenes
Gatsby's illusively quick movement through a failed re-adjustment of the
past and the present to reach the non-existent future. The slow, rhythmic
movement of natural phenomena is juxtaposed against the romantic,
supernatural and pervasive drift of Gatsby in quest of his dream. Defeat
is Gatsby's destiny. The final extinction of hope is surprising to all, even
to children who cluster open-mouthed about the pool. But the endless
drill of police, photographers and newspapers look at Gatsby with
unmoved eyes. The secretive activities of Wolfsheim are endangered
when there is a phone call for the dead Gatsby from Slagle. When Slagle
discovers that he is talking to the wrong person, there is a long silence
and we hear a quick squawk as the connection is broken. The bulbous-
fingered Wolfsheim gets to know early Gatsby, a young major too poor
to afford to buy regular clothes. The old-aged father wears too heavy an
ulster for that warm September day. With his mouth ajar of surprise and
wonder, he comes out of the room where his son lies lifeless. With
trembling hands he shows Nick the picture of the house, cracked in the
corners and dirty with many hands. In the thick drizzle, a motor hearse,
horribly black and wet, carries the coffin. The man with the thick owl-
eyed glasses, the only friend to attend, splashes over the soggy ground
after the funeral. One night, Nick hears a car of probably some final guest
approaching the house, then driving away. It seems he does not know
that the party, i.e. Gatsby's life and dream, was over. Cosmic response to
the destruction of the hope is seen in the closed big shore places, the
absence of light except from the shadowy moving glow of a ferryboat,
and the dark fields of the republic rolling under the night in the same way
Gatsby's dream and vision of the green light do under the hard malice of
reality.
Sometimes, Fitzgerald employs abstract and concrete adjectives in the
same phrase. There is a light, dignified knocking upon Nick's door when

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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Daisy is in. This is Gatsby's knocking that symbolizes his fear as well as
his insistence on pursuing the dream of greatness with dignity. The easy-
going blue coupe of Tom carries Daisy and Gatsby. Gatsby's temporary
victory is behind the relaxed driving while Tom's uneasiness causes the
nervous stepping on the accelerator to overtake Daisy and leave Myrtle
behind. The harmony of the universe is brought back and contrasted with
chaotic disarrangement of Gatsby. After Myrtle's murder and the
confrontation scene, it is a cool lovely day, there is a slow pleasant
movement in the air, and order is to be restored. The trees that lead for
Gatsby's house pander in whispers to the last and greatest of all human
dreams of excellence in the continent.
6 Conclusions
6.1 General Commentary
1. The Great Gatsby was variously interpreted. The novel was said to be
(i) a conflict between actual status and romantic aspirations, (ii) a
medieval romance of grail and quest, (iii) a religious story of the original
sin of man being trapped between what is and what would be, of man
attempting to change his fate through magical transformation, (iv) a
social comedy, satirical and moral, and (v) an ironic dream of excellence.
2. The Great Gatsby echoes The Wasteland images as well as characters,
especially the themes of aridness and sterility. Eliot's The Waste Land
and The Hollow Men, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Tennyson's Maud
are all brought in the novel's expression of the treacherous abyss of
contemporary times.
3. Gatsby's ordeal is America's ordeal. He has, but will never be able, to
separate the foul dust that floats in the wake of his dreams from the reality
of the dream itself. The American dream, which stretches between a
golden past and a golden present, is always betrayed by a desolate
present. America is, like Gatsby, unable to move from its historic past
into its historic future because of the trap of the present.
4. Daisy is an ambivalent character: she is what she is and what Gatsby
makes up of her. She fails to make the objective-correlative of Gatsby's
dream. She is torn between love in a lower life and stability in an arid
house. She is the victim of the general attitude of the society to women's
position. Her gravest fault is that she did not confess that she drove the
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

death car though she did not wink at the illegal aspects of Gatsby's
character. To Tom, she is only a beautiful little fool; she is too weak to
resist his hard, cruel arrogance.
5. Gatsby is a romantic hero who is relentless in his guest for a
transcendent dream, and who is compelled to modify his own identity.
Like America, he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He
embodies the American dream in its capacity to recapture a past that may
never have existed, in its ultimate futility. In his attempt to transfigure
money into love, Gatsby fails in his control of values. Gatsby's power is
in his conception of a dream, an image, of the future.
6. Like Gatsby, Myrtle has to make a transition between two classes that
are hostile and foreign to each other. Unlike him, she is satisfied with
some glimpses of success at reasonable intervals of time. Gatsby wants
to fix the whole past, transcend the present, and launch into the future.
To Tom, she is not only a sexual partner but also a symbol of ideal
domestic life.
7. Fitzgerald's style is celebrated. The unfolding of incidents keeps the
reader in an on-going dialogue with the characters. He wants to guide, to
warn, and to advise them. The style of the novel is poetic, i.e. it is
economic and suggestive; it says much by way of implication. The
language of movement, drifting, and floating is prevalent. The lyrical
nature of the novel is also clear in sentences that are reluctant to end.
This elaborateness uncovers the feelings and emotions of the characters
and wins those of the reader. The feelings of the characters, especially
those that have to do with Gatsby's dilemma, are so complex that Nick is
forced to resort to adjectives that describe indescribability. The novel
comprises various kinds of prose: narration by Nick, direct discourse,
first-person narration by Jordan, indirect discourse in a third-person
narration by Michaelis, and imagined direct discourse. Fitzgerald
manages through the use of diction to convince the reader that Gatsby's
death is not the death of a gangster but that of a slain god sacrificed for
the progression of time. The reader's firmness of moral judgment
changes from accusation to tenderness and sympathy. This is one of
Fitzgerald's many successes. Sight images rather than those associated
with deep feelings (sounds, tastes, and smells) are used to convey
Gatsby's values. This shows the defeatedness of Gatsby's character. The
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

lyrical style of the novel enables Nick to translate the events into feelings
that lie so deep as to defy precision of language.
8. The distribution and frequency of abstract and concrete adjectives
reinforce character portrayal. In Chapter Five, there are more concrete
adjectives. After a short meeting in Nick's house, Gatsby takes Daisy to
his house to show her the material realization of his dream: the big
postern, the marble steps, the sunken paths, and the uncountable shirts
and suits. In the end of this chapter, Daisy ceases to be convincing as an
object of Gatsby's dream; she tumbles short of them.
9. On the other hand, there are more abstract adjectives in respect to both
Gatsby and Daisy in Chapter Six. Here we have an account of (i) the
beginning of Gatsby's corrupt learning at the hands of Dan Cody, (ii)
Daisy's long-awaited coming to Gatsby's parties and her longed-for
dance with him, and (iii) the first acquaintance between them five years
before. The high proportion of abstract adjectives is thus understood.
10. There is a significantly high proportion of abstract adjectives in
respect to Daisy in Chapter One. The remaining chapters do not show
such a contrast between abstract and concrete adjectives. This high
proportion of abstract adjectives in Chapter One reinforces the fairy-like,
angelic character Nick draws of her. It accounts for Gatsby's infatuation
with, and the reader's admiration of, Daisy's character. In the remaining
chapters, when Daisy tumbles short of Gatsby's dream and when the ideal
picture of her has been materially actualized, abstract adjectives are used
less frequently than in Chapter One.
6.2 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives
1. The novel includes slightly more abstract than concrete adjectives:
1133 (i.e. 55.4%) and 911 (i.e. 44.6%) respectively.
2. There is a hierarchy of occurrence in the different characters, which
corresponds to their belief in and distance from the dream of excellence
as well as to their status on the social ladder.
3. Daisy Fay, the fairy-like creature, mainly in Gatsby's eyes and less so
in the eyes of the narrator, has the highest proportion of abstract
adjectives and the lowest proportion of concrete adjectives: 68.6% and
31.4% respectively.

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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

4. Jordan Baker, Daisy's intimate friend and co-member of the high class,
the society of old money, is next to Daisy in having a high proportion of
abstract (63.7%) and a low proportion of concrete adjectives (36.3%). To
the narrator, she represents some kind of love-object and offers some
kind of attraction, though not quite satisfactory for him. This distances
her at least partly, as Gatsby's love distances Daisy, from being
physically attainable; it grants her, as Gatsby's love grants Daisy, much
charm and glow.
5. On the other extreme of the continuum stand the Wilsons. They have
a high proportion of concrete adjectives (57.4%) and a low proportion of
abstract adjectives (42.6%). This shows Myrtle's nature: an object of
Tom's sensual love (or lust), and of Nick's as well as the reader's despise.
She is not worthy of any spiritual sublimity. Her aspirations are all
material. Her relationship with Tom is worldly, base and casual.
Her husband's bare and unprosperous life and business are conveyed
mainly through concrete adjectives. His physical weakness, and hence
inability to satisfy his wife's desires, do not pass unnoticed.
6. Tom is next to the Wilsons on the continuum. He has a higher
proportion of concrete than abstract adjectives: 52.1% and 47.9%
respectively. This reinforces his brutality and his body's enormous
leverage. He thinks so lowly of women. To him, Daisy is a beautiful little
fool who can be locked in a house and left behind, who can live in doubt
about her husband's faithfulness even during their honeymoon. Myrtle is
too base to receive any respect or love from him.
7. In between these two extremes on the continuum, Daisy and Jordan on
the one hand, and the Wilsons and Tom on the other, we have Gatsby
and Nick. They are probably the only two characters who have mutual
understanding and a reasonable amount of filial relation. This
understanding is more with Nick for Gatsby's character.
8. Gatsby has a higher proportion of abstract than concrete adjectives:
56.7% and 43.3% respectively. This shows the complexity of his
character. It shows him on the move both towards Daisy and towards the
closed society of old money. It shows him distancing himself from
debased sexual fulfillment. He is above Myrtle and Tom in this respect.
Gatsby looks up to Daisy (as Nick does to Jordan, though only partially)
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

as a symbol of transcendence and imagined object of love. Nick looks

down upon Myrtle and Tom's affair as a symbol of faithlessness and
distrust. In the same way, Gatsby looks down upon, but does not really
despise, the casual affair that Daisy is satisfied with.
9. When the six characters are merged into three attitudes to life and to
the American dream, we have Daisy and Jordan, Gatsby and Nick, and
Tom and Myrtle. There are high proportions of abstract and low
proportions of concrete adjectives in Daisy and Jordan. We have opposite
proportions in Myrtle and Tom. Gatsby and Nick stand in between.
10. The attitude of Daisy and Jordan to life reflects women's position in
America in the 1920s. They depended for social position on their beauty
and hypocrisy. They wink at the illegal and the immoral in order to
maintain a secure family life. Sometimes, they sacrifice love for the sake
of stability and employ love as a means to achieve security in marriage.
They make up for the aridity of married life through parties and secret
extra-marital, not necessarily lustful, relationships. This is reflected in
the higher proportion of abstract than concrete adjectives: 67.2% and
32.8% respectively.
11. The opposite attitude is that of low-class women and the high-class
men attracted to them. The transition of Myrtle to a higher, and of Tom
to a lower, class is a symptom of moral corruption. Myrtle seeks material
gain in Tom, and he seeks bodily love in her. This sensual desire on both
sides is behind the high proportion of concrete and low proportion of
abstract adjectives: 54.6% and 45.4% respectively.
12. The attitude in between is that of Gatsby and Nick. Gatsby's complex
character derives from the complexity of his aspirations. Nick's
admiration of Gatsby endows his character with similar complexity. Both
aspire to transfigure the resources of the present into the promise of the
future, each in his own way. Nick comes east to explore, to unfold the
shining secrets of wealth so that he can join the higher class. Gatsby has
the same purpose, but his means is different. While Nick believes in hard
work and shuns illegal and immoral means, Gatsby follows every
possible means to attain a better future. This complexity of character in
Gatsby and in Nick coincides with and is reflected in the complex
mixture of abstract and concrete adjectives.

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6.3 Fields of Abstract and Concrete Adjectives

1. The majority of the adjectives employed in the portrayal of Daisy's
character have to do with (i) her beauty/appearance and (ii) her emotional
instability. These are the principal features of her character. Her beauty
wins her Tom for a husband, fascinates Nick, and tempts Gatsby into
falling in love with her. Her emotional instability results from her dual
purpose in life: to secure her married life and to invest her love-story to
satisfy her heart.
2. The majority of adjectives used in the portrayal of Gatsby's character
are concerned with (i) his unattainable dream, (ii) his wealth, and (iii) his
outrageous parties. He attempts to utilize his wealth, especially through
parties, to fulfill his dream and to transfigure money into love.
3. In Myrtle's character, the majority of adjectives have to do with here
material aspirations. Her fault is that she gave herself in for Tom for the
sake of gaining a few worldly possessions. The adjectives used with her
husband are mainly about (i) his weakness throughout his life and (ii) his
historic, final decision to revenge himself. His weakness results from his
poverty and from his wife's dissatisfaction with his poor life. His final
revolt probably incurs divine retribution against the immoral and the
illegal both in her and in Gatsby.
4. In the portrayal of Daisy's character, there are only abstract adjectives
in respect to her hypocrisy, more abstract than concrete adjectives in
respect to her misery, her beauty/appearance, and her instability, and
only concrete adjectives in respect to her wealth.
5. In the portrayal of Gatsby's character, there are more abstract
adjectives in respect to his parties, his dream, and his reservedness, only
abstract adjectives in respect to his corruption and his attraction, and
more concrete adjectives in respect to his wealth.
6. In Mr. Wilson, there are more concrete adjectives in respect to his
weakness. In Myrtle, there are more concrete adjectives in almost all the
fields of investigation.
6.4 Symbolism and Images
1. The great Gatsby is a parable of modern American life. It has therefore
an almost complete scaffolding of symbols. The green light is the
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

American dream of an orgiastic future. The valley of ashes is Fitzgerald's

version of Eliot's The Waste Land. The ineffectual eyes of Dr. Eckleburg
represent God's passive role in modern life. Bad driving and car accidents
symbolize lack of responsibility and direction. Music is used
symbolically to reinforce the action or the status of characters. The clock
symbolizes Time. The Little Girl Bay symbolizes the temptation of
women for both Dan Cody and Gatsby. The foul dust symbolizes the
corrupt materialism of the dream.
2. Daisy's voice is a landmark in this novel. It plays a great role in the
unfolding of her character and is employed to reinforce the meanings
intended and feelings undergone.
3. Verbs and adverbs are successfully employed side by side mainly with
Daisy's voice and partly with the speeches of other characters, especially
in the confrontation scene between Gatsby and Tom.
4. Eye imagery enriches the novel. Gatsby awaits reunion with Daisy
with vacant eyes. He looks with distraught eves when he is embarrassed
in the beginning of the meeting, but with tense unhappy eyes when a faint
doubt comes to him as to the quality of his dream of her. In Daisy's house,
he gazes around with fascinated eyes, admiring the beauty of the house.
Myrtle's eyes were wide with jealous terror when she saw Jordan
mistaking her for Daisy. In the confrontation between Tom and Gatsby,
Daisy's eyes fell on Jordan and Nick with a sort of appeal. The weakness
of George Wilson is reinforced by his light blue eyes. His anger when
his wife was killed is seen in his glazed eyes. Wilson's eyes fell upon
Tom accusingly. Tom went out of Wilson's garage, his eyes avoiding the
table on which Myrtle's body stretched.
Part Two provides the text of the novel with the adjective phrases and
the noun phrases including adjectives underlined for easier reference.
Reading the novel with these underlined lexical items taken into account
helps highlight the distinctions made between the characters in the light
of abstract and concrete adjectives discussed in Part One.

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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Part Two: The text of The Novel

Chapter 1
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, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and
also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind
is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a
normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused
of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,
unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I
have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by
some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the
horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms
in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by
obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
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 parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission
that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet
marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. 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. If personality is an unbroken series of successful
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

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
an 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 dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed
out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
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 today.
I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with
special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s
office. 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 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. Everybody
I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more
single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were
choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—yees’ with very
grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after
various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of
twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm
season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so
when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together
in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a
weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last
minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away,
and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked
breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more
recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
‘How do you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide,
a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the
freedom of the neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the
trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction
that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be
pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes
on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my
shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold
the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew.
And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was
rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and
obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring
back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of
all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life
is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of
the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender
riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there
are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land.
Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour
and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated
body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of
Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the
Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their
physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls
that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their
dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

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. 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 eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore,
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.
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.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one
of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a
national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute
limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-
climax. 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. 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.
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East

Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was
even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian
Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and
ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials
and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house
drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its
run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now
with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and
Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the
front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy,
straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious
manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his
face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively
forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide
the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening
boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of
muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. 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. 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.
‘Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,’ he seemed to
say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were
in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always
had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him
with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the
front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of
deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide
off shore.
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again,

politely and abruptly. ‘We’ll go inside.’
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosycolored space,
fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The
windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside
that seemed to grow a little way into the house. 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-colored 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.
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. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint
of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for
having disturbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly
forward with a conscientious expression— then she laughed, an absurd,
charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.
‘I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.’
She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my
hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no
one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She
hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker.
(I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean
toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

At any rate Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost

imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object
she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something
of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any
exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low,
thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down
as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played
again. 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 men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing
compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay,
exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things
hovering in the next hour.
I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east
and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
‘Do they miss me?’ she cried ecstatically.
‘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.’
‘How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!’ Then she added
irrelevantly, ‘You ought to see the baby.’
‘I’d like to.’
‘She’s asleep. She’s two years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?’
‘Never.’
‘Well, you ought to see her. She’s—’
Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room
stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.
‘What you doing, Nick?’
‘I’m a bond man.’
‘Who with?’
I told him.
‘Never heard of them,’ he remarked decisively. This annoyed me.
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

‘You will,’ I answered shortly. ‘You will if you stay in the East.’
‘Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,’ he said, glancing at Daisy
and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. ‘I’d be a
God Damned fool to live anywhere else.’
At this point Miss Baker said ‘Absolutely!’ with such suddenness that
I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room.
Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with
a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
‘I’m stiff,’ she complained, ‘I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as
I can remember.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Daisy retorted. ‘I’ve been trying to get you to New
York all afternoon.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the
pantry, ‘I’m absolutely in training.’
Her host looked at her incredulously.
‘You are!’ He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom
of a glass. ‘How you ever get anything done is beyond me.’
I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she ‘got done.’ I
enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small breasted girl, with an
erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at
the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back
at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming
discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture
of her, somewhere before.
‘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?’
Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced;
wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan
compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to
another square.
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Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young
women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset
where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.
‘Why candles?’ objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with
her fingers. ‘In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.’ She looked
at us all radiantly. ‘Do you always watch for the longest day of the year
and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then
miss it.’
‘We ought to plan something,’ yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at
the table as if she were getting into bed.
‘All right,’ said Daisy. ‘What’ll we plan?’ She turned to me helplessly.
‘What do people plan?’
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.
Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with
a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool
as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all
desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a
polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that
presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would
be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West
where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a
continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of
the moment itself.
‘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?’
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

I meant nothing in particular by this 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
Coloured 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.
‘You ought to live in California—’ began Miss Baker but Tom
interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
‘This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—
’ After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and
she winked at me again. ‘—and we’ve produced all the things that go to
make civilization— oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?’
There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his
complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.
When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left
the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned
toward me.
‘I’ll tell you a family secret,’ she whispered enthusiastically. ‘It’s
about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?’
‘That’s why I came over tonight.’

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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

‘Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for

some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred
people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began
to affect his nose—’
‘Things went from bad to worse,’ suggested Miss Baker.
‘Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up
his position.’
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her
glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I
listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering
regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear
whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went
inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned
forward again, her voice glowing and singing.
‘I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a— of a rose,
an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?’ She turned to Miss Baker for
confirmation. ‘An absolute rose?’
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only
extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was
trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling
words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused
herself and went into the house.
Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of
meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said ‘Sh!’ in
a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the
room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear.
The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted
excitedly, and then ceased altogether.
‘This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—’ I said.
‘Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.’
‘Is something happening?’ I inquired innocently.
‘You mean to say you don’t know?’ said Miss Baker, honestly
surprised. ‘I thought everybody knew.’
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

‘I don’t.’
‘Why—’ she said hesitantly, ‘Tom’s got some woman in New York.’
‘Got some woman?’ I repeated blankly.
Miss Baker nodded.
‘She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time.
Don’t you think?’
Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a
dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at
the table.
‘It couldn’t be helped!’ cried Daisy with tense gayety.
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 singing 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.’
The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head
decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished
into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I
remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of
wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t
guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker
who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly
to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain
temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own
instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss
Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the
library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to
look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a
chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we
sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

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Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her
eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent
emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some
sedative questions about her little girl.
‘We don’t know each other very well, Nick,’ she said suddenly. ‘Even
if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.’
‘I wasn’t back from the war.’
‘That’s true.’ She 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 when 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 thrilling scorn. ‘Sophisticated—God, I’m
sophisticated!’
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my
belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy,
as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a
contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment
she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had

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asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which

she and Tom belonged.
*
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat
at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the
‘Saturday Evening Post’— the words, murmurous and uninflected,
running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots
and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as
she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.
When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.
‘To be continued,’ she said, tossing the magazine on the table, ‘in our
very next issue.’
Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she
stood up.
‘Ten o’clock,’ she remarked, apparently finding the time on the
ceiling. ‘Time for this good girl to go to bed.’
‘Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,’ explained Daisy,
‘over at Westchester.’
‘Oh,—you’re JORdan Baker.’
I knew now why her face was familiar— its pleasing contemptuous
expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the
sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard
some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had
forgotten long ago.
‘Good night,’ she said softly. ‘Wake me at eight, won’t you.’
‘If you’ll get up.’
‘I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.’
‘Of course you will,’ confirmed Daisy. ‘In fact I think I’ll arrange a
marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you
together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push
you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—’
‘Good night,’ called Miss Baker from the stairs. ‘I haven’t heard a
word.’
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‘She’s a nice girl,’ said Tom after a moment. ‘They oughtn’t to let her
run around the country this way.’
‘Who oughtn’t to?’ inquired Daisy coldly.
‘Her family.’
‘Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s
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. Our
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.
I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I
got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side
in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor, Daisy peremptorily
called ‘Wait!’
I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were
engaged to a girl out West.’
‘That’s right,’ corroborated Tom kindly.
‘It’s libel. I’m too poor.’
‘But we heard it,’ insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again
in a flower-like way. ‘We heard it from three people so it must be true.’
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even
vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one
of the reasons I had come east. You can’t stop going with an old friend
on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being
rumored into marriage.
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Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—
nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It
seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house,
child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head.
As for Tom, the fact that he ‘had some woman in New York’ was really
less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something
was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical
egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of
wayside garages, where new red petrol-pumps sat out in pools of light,
and when I reached my estate at West Egg, I ran the car under its shed
and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind
had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees
and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the
frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the
moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—
fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s
mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the
silver pepper of the stars. 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.
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.

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Chapter 2
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 ash-
gray 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.
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. J.
Eckleburg. 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. 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.
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.
The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known.
His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafes
with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with
whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to
meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one
afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet
and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car.
‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination

to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption
was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.
I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked
back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent
stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting
on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering
to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it
contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant
approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs.
GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom
inside.
The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the
dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had
occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that
sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the
proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on
a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly
handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light
blue eyes.
‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the
shoulder. ‘How’s business?’
‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you
going to sell me that car?’
‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’
‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it,
maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant—’
His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage.
Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of
a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the
middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh
sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark
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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. 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.
‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’
‘All right.’
‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’
She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson
emerged with two chairs from his office door.
We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days
before the Fourth of July, and a grey, 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.
She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched
tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New
York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a
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moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream
and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she
let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-
colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the
station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply
from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass.
‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one
for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’
We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to
John D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen
very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.
‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the
taxi-window.
‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’
‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that
kind?’
The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and
drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.
‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom.
‘No, it’s not exactly a police dog,’ said the man with disappointment
in his voice. ‘It’s more of an Airedale.’ He passed his hand over the
brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog
that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’
‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’
‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten
dollars.’
The Airedale—undoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in it
somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and
settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-
proof coat with rapture.
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately.
‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’

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‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy
ten more dogs with it.’
We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on
the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see
a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.
‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’
‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be hurt if you
don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’
‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister Catherine. She’s said
to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’
‘Well, I’d like to, but—’
We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West
Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white
cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around
the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other
purchases and went haughtily in.
‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she announced as we rose
in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’
The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small
dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded
to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so
that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies
swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-
enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked
at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the
countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old
copies of ‘Town Tattle ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon
Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway.
Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy
went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own
initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed
apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought
out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door.

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I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that
afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it
although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.
Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the
telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at
the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so
I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of Simon
Called Peter— either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things
because it didn’t make any sense to me.
Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called
each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to
arrive at the apartment door.
The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with
a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white.
Her eyebrows 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. When she moved about there was an
incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down
upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked
around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here.
But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question
aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.
Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below. He had just
shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he was
most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me
that he was in the ‘artistic game’ and I gathered later that he was a
photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson’s
mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill,
languid, handsome and horrible. She told me with pride that her husband
had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had
been married.
Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now
attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, which
gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the
influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The
intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted
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into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions

became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded
the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a
noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.
‘My dear,’ she told her sister in a high mincing shout, ‘most of these
fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a
woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the
bill you’d of thought she had my appendicitis out.’
‘What was the name of the woman?’ asked Mrs. McKee.
‘Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people’s feet in their own
homes.’
‘I like your dress,’ remarked Mrs. McKee, ‘I think it’s adorable.’
Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in
disdain.
‘It’s just a crazy old thing,’ she said. ‘I just slip it on sometimes when
I don’t care what I look like.’
‘But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,’ pursued
Mrs. McKee. ‘If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could
make something of it.’
We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson who removed a strand of hair
from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr.
McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side and then moved
his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.
‘I should change the light,’ he said after a moment. ‘I’d like to bring
out the modelling of the features. And I’d try to get hold of all the back
hair.’
‘I wouldn’t think of changing the light,’ cried Mrs. McKee. ‘I think
it’s—’
Her husband said ‘SH!’ and we all looked at the subject again
whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.
‘You McKees have something to drink,’ he said. ‘Get some more ice
and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep.’

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‘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.’
She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to
the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that
a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.
‘I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island,’ asserted Mr. McKee.
Tom looked at him blankly.
‘Two of them we have framed downstairs.’
‘Two what?’ demanded Tom.
‘Two studies. One of them I call ‘Montauk Point—the Gulls,’ and the
other I call ‘Montauk Point—the Sea.’
The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.
‘Do you live down on Long Island, too?’ she inquired.
‘I live at West Egg.’
‘Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago.At a man
named Gatsby’s. Do you know him?’
‘I live next door to him.’
‘Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s
where all his money comes from.’
‘Really?’
She nodded.
‘I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.’
This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by
Mrs. McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:
‘Chester, I think you could do something with HER,’ she broke out,
but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to
Tom.
‘I’d like to do more work on Long Island if I could get the entry. All I
ask is that they should give me a start.’

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‘Ask Myrtle,’ said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Mrs.
Wilson entered with a tray. ‘She’ll give you a letter of introduction,
won’t you, Myrtle?’
‘Do what?’ she asked, startled.
‘You’ll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can
do some studies of him.’ His lips moved silently for a moment as he
invented. ‘ ‘George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,’ or something like
that.’
Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: ‘Neither of
them can stand the person they’re married to.’
‘Can’t they?’
‘Can’t stand them.’ She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. ‘What I
say is, why go on living with them if they can’t stand them? If I was them
I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away.’
‘Doesn’t she like Wilson either?’
The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle who had
overheard the question and it was violent and obscene.
‘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.’
‘It’d be more discreet to go to Europe.’
‘Oh, do you like Europe?’ she exclaimed surprisingly. ‘I just got back
from Monte Carlo.’
‘Really.’
‘Just last year. I went over there with another girl.’
‘Stay long?’
‘No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of
Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started but we
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got gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful
time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!’
The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the
blue honey of the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee
called me back into the room.
‘I almost made a mistake, too,’ she declared vigorously. ‘I almost
married a little kyke who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below
me. Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Lucille, that man’s way below you!’
But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure.’
‘Yes, but listen,’ said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down,
‘at least you didn’t marry him.’
‘I know I didn’t.’
‘Well, I married him,’ said Myrtle, ambiguously. ‘And that’s the
difference between your case and mine.’
‘Why did you, Myrtle?’ demanded Catherine. ‘Nobody forced you to.’
Myrtle considered.
‘I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,’ she said finally.
‘I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick
my shoe.’
‘You were crazy about him for a while,’ said Catherine.
‘Crazy about him!’ cried Myrtle incredulously. ‘Who said I was crazy
about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that
man there.’
She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I
tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.
‘The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I
made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in and
never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he
was out. She looked around to see who was listening: ‘ ‘Oh, is that your
suit?’ I said. ‘This is the first I ever heard about it.’ But I gave it to him
and then I lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon.’

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‘She really ought to get away from him,’ resumed Catherine to me.
‘They’ve been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tom’s the
first sweetie she ever had.’
The bottle of whiskey—a second one—was now in constant demand
by all present, excepting Catherine who ‘felt just as good on nothing at
all.’ Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated
sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to
get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but
each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument
which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the
city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of
human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was
him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without,
simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of
life.
Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath
poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.
‘It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last
ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and
spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes and I
couldn’t keep my eyes off him but every time he looked at me I had to
pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came
into the station he was next to me and his white shirt-front pressed against
my arm—and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I
lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly
know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over
and over, was ‘You can’t live forever, you can’t live forever.’
She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial
laughter.
‘My dear,’ she cried, ‘I’m going to give you this dress as soon as I’m
through with it. I’ve got to get another one tomorrow. I’m going to make
a list of all the things I’ve got to get. A massage and a wave and a collar
for the dog and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring,
and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother’s grave that’ll last all

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summer. I got to write down a list so I won’t forget all the things I got to
do.’
It was nine o’clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my
watch and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his
fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out
my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried
lather that had worried me all the afternoon.
The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through
the smoke and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared,
reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other,
searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. 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.
Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women’s
voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain.
Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door.
When he had gone half way he turned around and stared at the scene—
his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and
there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing
figure on the couch bleeding fluently and trying to spread a copy of
‘Town Tattle’ over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then Mr. McKee
turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier
I followed.
‘Come to lunch some day,’ he suggested, as we groaned down in the
elevator.
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘Keep your hands off the lever,’ snapped the elevator boy.

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‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr. McKee with dignity, ‘I didn’t know I
was touching it.’
‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘I’ll be glad to.’
… I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the
sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
‘Beauty and the Beast … Loneliness … Old Grocery Horse …
Brook’n Bridge ….’
Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the
Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning ‘Tribune’ and waiting for
the four o’clock train.

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Chapter 3
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 the 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 two motor-boats slit
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.
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer
in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his
back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the
kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an
hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several
hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas
tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On 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.
In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with
gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his
female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived—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. The last swimmers have
come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New
York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons
and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair bobbed in strange
new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. 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
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introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between

women who never knew each other’s names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and
now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of
voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled
with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more
swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath—
already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there
among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment
the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the
sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing
light.
Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out
of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco
dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the
orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a burst
of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s
understudy from the ‘Follies.’ The party has begun.
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.
I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s egg
blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly
formal note from his employer—the honor would be entirely Gatsby’s,
it said, if I would attend his ‘little party’ that night. He had seen me
several times and had intended to call on me long before but a peculiar
combination of circumstances had prevented it—signed Jay Gatsby in a
majestic hand.

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Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven
and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies of
people I didn’t know—though here and there was a face I had noticed on
the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young
Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and
all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was
sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles.
They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity
and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.
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.
I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when
Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble
steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest
down into the garden.
Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone
before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.
‘Hello!’ I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally
loud across the garden.
‘I thought you might be here,’ she responded absently as I came up. ‘I
remembered you lived next door to—’
She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of
me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses who
stopped at the foot of the steps.
‘Hello!’ they cried together. ‘Sorry you didn’t win.’
That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week
before.
‘You don’t know who we are,’ said one of the girls in yellow, ‘but we
met you here about a month ago.’

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‘You’ve dyed your hair since then,’ remarked Jordan, and I started but
the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the
premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s
basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine we descended
the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us
through the twilight and we sat down at a table with the two girls in
yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble.
‘Do you come to these parties often?’ inquired Jordan of the girl beside
her.
‘The last one was the one I met you at,’ answered the girl, in an alert,
confident voice. She turned to her companion: ‘Wasn’t it for you,
Lucille?’
It was for Lucille, too.
‘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.’
‘There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,’
said the other girl eagerly. ‘He doesn’t want any trouble with anybody.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ I inquired.
‘Gatsby. Somebody told me—’
The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.
‘Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.’
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward
and listened eagerly.
‘I don’t think it’s so much that,’ argued Lucille skeptically; ‘it’s more
that he was a German spy during the war.’
One of the men nodded in confirmation.

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‘I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him
in Germany,’ he assured us positively.
‘Oh, no,’ said the first girl, ‘it couldn’t be that, because he was in the
American army during the war.’ As our credulity switched back to her
she leaned forward with enthusiasm. ‘You look at him sometimes when
he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.’
She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned
and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic
speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those
who found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.
The first supper—there would be another one after midnight—was
now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party who were
spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were three
married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate given to
violent innuendo and obviously under the impression that sooner or later
Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree.
Instead of rambling this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity,
and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the
countryside— East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on
guard against its spectroscopic gayety.
‘Let’s get out,’ whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and
inappropriate half hour. ‘This is much too polite for me.’
We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host—I
had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The
undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.
The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded but Gatsby was not
there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on
the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked
into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and
probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.
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.

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‘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 skepticism 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 its shelf
muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to
collapse.
‘Who brought you?’ he demanded. ‘Or did you just come? I was
brought. Most people were brought.’
Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully without answering.
‘I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,’ he continued. ‘Mrs.
Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve
been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to
sit in a library.’
‘Has it?’
‘A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I
tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—’
‘You told us.’
We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.

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There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing
young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples
holding each other tortuously, fashionably and keeping in the corners—
and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving
the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps. By
midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian
and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and between the numbers
people were doing ‘stunts’ all over the garden, while happy vacuous
bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. 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. The moon
had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales,
trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.
I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of
about my age and a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest
provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had
taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before
my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.
At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.
‘Your face is familiar,’ he said, politely. ‘Weren’t you in the Third
Division during the war?’
‘Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion.’
‘I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d
seen you somewhere before.’
We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France.
Evidently he lived in this vicinity for he told me that he had just bought
a hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning.
‘Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.’
‘What time?’
‘Any time that suits you best.’
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked
around and smiled.
‘Having a gay time now?’ she inquired.

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‘Much better.’ I turned again to my new acquaintance. ‘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.’
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.
Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler
hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him
on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of
us in turn.
‘If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,’ he urged me. ‘Excuse
me. I will rejoin you later.’
When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan— constrained to
assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a
florid and corpulent person in his middle years.
‘Who is he?’ I demanded. ‘Do you know?’
‘He’s just a man named Gatsby.’
‘Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?’

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‘Now you’re started on the subject,’ she answered with a wan smile.
‘Well,—he told me once he was an Oxford man.’
A dim background started to take shape behind him but at her next
remark it faded away.
‘However, I don’t believe it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ she insisted, ‘I just don’t think he went there.’
Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s ‘I think he killed
a man,’ and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would have
accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the
swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was
comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial
inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy
a palace on Long Island Sound.
‘Anyhow he gives large parties,’ said Jordan, changing the subject
with an urbane distaste for the concrete. ‘And I like large parties. They’re
so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.’
There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra
leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he cried. ‘At the request of Mr. Gatsby we
are going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff’s latest work which
attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the
papers you know there was a big sensation.’ He smiled with jovial
condescension and added ‘Some sensation!’ whereupon everybody
laughed.
‘The piece is known,’ he concluded lustily, ‘as ‘Vladimir Tostoff’s
Jazz History of the World.’
‘The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me, because just as
it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and
looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin
was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as
though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him.
I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from
his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal
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hilarity increased. When the ‘Jazz History of the World’ was over girls
were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial
way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men’s arms, even into
groups knowing that some one would arrest their falls—but no one
swooned backward on Gatsby and no French bob touched Gatsby’s
shoulder and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s head for one
link.
‘I beg your pardon.’
Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us.
‘Miss Baker?’ he inquired. ‘I beg your pardon but Mr. Gatsby would
like to speak to you alone.’
‘With me?’ she exclaimed in surprise.
‘Yes, madame.’
She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and
followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening
dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about
her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on
clean, crisp mornings.
I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and
intriguing sounds had issued from a long many-windowed room which
overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan’s undergraduate who was now
engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who
implored me to join him, I went inside.
The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was
playing the piano and beside her stood a tall, red haired young lady from
a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of
champagne and during the course of her song she had decided ineptly
that everything was very very sad—she was not only singing, she was
weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with
gasping broken sobs and then took up the lyric again in a quavering
soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for
when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they
assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black
rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her

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face whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair and went off
into a deep vinous sleep.
‘She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,’ explained a
girl at my elbow.
I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having
fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s party, the
quartet from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men
was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife after
attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way
broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks—at intervals she
appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed ‘You
promised!’ into his ear.
The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The
hall was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their
highly indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in
slightly raised voices.
‘Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.’
‘Never heard anything so selfish in my life.’
‘We’re always the first ones to leave.’
‘So are we.’
‘Well, we’re almost the last tonight,’ said one of the men sheepishly.
‘The orchestra left half an hour ago.’
In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond
credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were
lifted kicking into the night.
As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and
Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last
word to her but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into
formality as several people approached him to say goodbye.
Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch but she
lingered for a moment to shake hands.
‘I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,’ she whispered. ‘How long
were we in there?’

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‘Why,—about an hour.’
‘It was—simply amazing,’ she repeated abstractedly. ‘But I swore I
wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.’ She yawned gracefully in
my face. ‘Please come and see me …. Phone book…. Under the name of
Mrs. Sigourney Howard…. My aunt….’ She was hurrying off as she
talked—her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her
party at the door.
Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I
joined the last of Gatsby’s guests who were clustered around him. I
wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to
apologize for not having known him in the garden.
‘Don’t mention it,’ he enjoined me eagerly. ‘Don’t give it another
thought, old sport.’ The familiar expression held no more familiarity than
the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. ‘And don’t forget
we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning at nine o’clock.’
Then the butler, behind his shoulder:
‘Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.’
‘All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there. … good night.’
‘Good night.’
‘Good night.’ He smiled—and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant
significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it
all the time. ‘Good night, old sport…. Good night.’
But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite
over. Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre
and tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side up but
violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupé which had left Gatsby’s
drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted for the
detachment of the wheel which was now getting considerable attention
from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars
blocking the road a harsh discordant din from those in the rear had been
audible for some time and added to the already violent confusion of the
scene.

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A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood
in the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire and from the
tire to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.
‘See!’ he explained. ‘It went in the ditch.’
The fact was infinitely astonishing to him—and I recognized first the
unusual quality of wonder and then the man—it was the late patron of
Gatsby’s library.
‘How’d it happen?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘I know nothing whatever about mechanics,’ he said decisively.
‘But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter.
‘I know very little about driving—next to nothing. It happened, and that’s
all I know.’
‘Well, if you’re a poor driver you oughtn’t to try driving at night.’
‘But I wasn’t even trying,’ he explained indignantly, ‘I wasn’t even
trying.’
An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.
‘Do you want to commit suicide?’
‘You’re lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even trying!’
‘You don’t understand,’ explained the criminal. ‘I wasn’t driving.
There’s another man in the car.’
The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained
‘Ah-h-h!’ as the door of the coupé swung slowly open. The crowd—it
was now a crowd—stepped back involuntarily and when the door had
opened wide there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by
part, a pale dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing
tentatively at the ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe.
Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant
groaning of the horns the apparition stood swaying for a moment before
he perceived the man in the duster.
‘Wha’s matter?’ he inquired calmly. ‘Did we run outa gas?’
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‘Look!’
Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel—he stared at it
for a moment and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had
dropped from the sky.
‘It came off,’ some one explained.
He nodded.
‘At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.’
A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders he
remarked in a determined voice:
‘Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?’
At least a dozen men, some of them a little better off than he was,
explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any
physical bond.
‘Back out,’ he suggested after a moment. ‘Put her in reverse.’
‘But the wheel’s off!’
He hesitated.
‘No harm in trying,’ he said.
The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away
and cut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a
moon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before
and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. 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.
*
Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the
impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all
that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a
crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less
than my personal affairs.
Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my
shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New
York to the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-
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salesmen by their first names and lunched with them in dark crowded
restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even
had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the
accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in
my direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly
away.
I took dinner usually at the Yale Club—for some reason it was the
gloomiest event of my day—and then I went upstairs to the library and
studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. There were
generally a few rioters around but they never came into the library so it
was a good place to work. After that, if the night was mellow I strolled
down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel and over Thirty-
third Street to the Pennsylvania Station.
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and
the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines
gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out
romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was
going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.
Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the
corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before
they faded through a door into warm darkness. 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.
Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five
deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a
sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited,
and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted
cigarettes outlined unintelligible circles inside. Imagining that I, too, was
hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished
them well.
For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I
found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her because she
was a golf champion and every one knew her name. Then it was
something more. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender
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curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed
something—most affectations conceal something eventually, even
though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it was.
When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a
borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it—
and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that
night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that
nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her
ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the
proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his
statement and the only other witness admitted that he might have been
mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw
that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from
a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She
wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this
unwillingness 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.
It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you
never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on
that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving
a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our
fender flicked a button on one man’s coat.
‘You’re a rotten driver,’ I protested. ‘Either you ought to be more
careful or you oughtn’t to drive at all.’
‘I am careful.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Well, other people are,’ she said lightly.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘They’ll keep out of my way,’ she insisted. ‘It takes two to make an
accident.’
‘Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.’

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‘I hope I never will,’ she answered. ‘I hate careless people. That’s why
I like you.’
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had
deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her.
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my
desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that
tangle back home. I’d been writing letters once a week and signing them:
‘Love, Nick,’ and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl
played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.
Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully
broken off before I was free.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and
this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

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Chapter 4
On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages along shore
the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled
hilariously on his lawn.
‘He’s a bootlegger,’ said the young ladies, moving somewhere
between his cocktails and his flowers. ‘One time he killed a man who
had found out that he was nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin
to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that
there crystal glass.’
Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of
those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old time-table
now, disintegrating at its folds and headed ‘This schedule in effect July
5th, 1922.’ But I can still read the grey names and they will give you a
better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s
hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever
about him.
From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches and
a man named Bunsen whom I knew at Yale and Doctor Webster Civet
who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the
Willie Voltaires and a whole clan named Blackbuck who always
gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever
came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach
and Mr. Chrystie’s wife) and Edgar Beaver, whose hair they say turned
cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only
once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in
the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O.
R. P. Schraeders and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia and the
Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he
went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs.
Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came
too and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink
and the Hammerheads and Beluga the tobacco importer and Beluga’s
girls.

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From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck
and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid who
controlled Films Par Excellence and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don
S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the
movies in one way or another. And 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—they came to gamble
and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out
and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.
A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he
became known as ‘the boarder’—I doubt if he had any other home. Of
theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and
Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New
York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and
Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the
Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns,
divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto who killed himself by jumping in
front of a subway train in Times Square.
Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never
quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one
with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have
forgotten their names—Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria or
Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of
flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists
whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.
In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came
there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer who had his
nose shot off in the war and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his
fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters, and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the
American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip with a man reputed to be her
chauffeur, and a prince of something whom we called Duke and whose
name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.
*
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At nine o’clock, one morning late in July Gatsby’s gorgeous car

lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody
from its three noted horn. It was the first time he had called on me though
I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and, at his
urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach.
‘Good morning, old sport. You’re having lunch with me today 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.
He saw me looking with admiration at his car.
‘It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport.’ He jumped off to give me a better view.
‘Haven’t you ever seen it before?’
I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright
with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with
triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with
a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down
behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we
started to town.
I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and
found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So my first
impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had
gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate
roadhouse next door.
And then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn’t reached West Egg
village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished and
slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-colored suit.
‘Look here, old sport,’ he broke out surprisingly. ‘What’s your opinion
of me, anyhow?’

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A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that

question deserves.
‘Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life,’ he interrupted.
‘I don’t want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you
hear.’
So he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavored conversation
in his halls.
‘I’ll tell you God’s truth.’ His right hand suddenly ordered divine
retribution to stand by. ‘I am the son of some wealthy people in the
middle-west—all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated
at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many
years. It is a family tradition.’
He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had
believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase ‘educated at Oxford,’ or
swallowed it or choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And
with this doubt his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there
wasn’t something a little sinister about him after all.
‘What part of the middle-west?’ I inquired casually.
‘San Francisco.’
‘I see.’
‘My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.’
His voice was solemn as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a
clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my
leg but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.
‘After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe—
Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big
game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget
something very sad that had happened to me long ago.’
With an effort 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.

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‘Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief and I tried very
hard to die but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a
commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I
took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half
mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. We
stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with
sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the
insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was
promoted to be a major and every Allied government gave me a
decoration—even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic
Sea!’
Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them—with
his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and
sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It
appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited
this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was
submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a
dozen magazines.
He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell
into my palm.
‘That’s the one from Montenegro.’
To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look.
Orderi di Danilo, ran the circular legend, Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.
‘Turn it.’
Major Jay Gatsby, I read, For Valour Extraordinary.
‘Here’s another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. It
was taken in Trinity Quad—the man on my left is now the Earl of
Dorcaster.’
It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in
an archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was
Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger—with a cricket bat in his
hand.

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Then it was all true. 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.
‘I’m going to make a big request of you today,’ he said, pocketing his
souvenirs with satisfaction, ‘so I thought you ought to know something
about me. I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody. You see, I
usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying
to forget the sad thing that happened to me.’ He hesitated. ‘You’ll hear
about it this afternoon.’
‘At lunch?’
‘No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you’re taking Miss
Baker to tea.’
‘Do you mean you’re in love with Miss Baker?’
‘No, old sport, I’m not. But Miss Baker has kindly consented to speak
to you about this matter.’
I hadn’t the faintest idea what ‘this matter’ was, but I was more
annoyed than interested. I hadn’t asked Jordan to tea in order to discuss
Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be something utterly
fantastic and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot upon his
overpopulated lawn.
He wouldn’t say another word. His correctness grew on him as we
neared the city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of
red-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with
the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded gilt nineteen-hundreds. 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!’ of a motor cycle, and a frantic
policeman rode alongside.
‘All right, old sport,’ called Gatsby. We slowed down. Taking a white
card from his wallet he waved it before the man’s eyes.

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‘Right you are,’ agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. ‘Know you
next time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse me!’
‘What was that?’ I inquired. ‘The picture of Oxford?’
‘I was able to do the commissioner a favor once, and he sends me a
Christmas card every year.’
Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a
constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the
river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-
olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always
the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery
and the beauty in the world.
A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by
two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for
friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper
lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby’s
splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. As we crossed
Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, 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.
‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought;
‘anything at all….’
Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.
Roaring noon. In a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met
Gatsby for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside my
eyes picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man.
‘Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem.’
A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with
two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a
moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.
‘—so I took one look at him—’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand
earnestly, ‘—and what do you think I did?’
‘What?’ I inquired politely.

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But evidently he was not addressing me for he dropped my hand and

covered Gatsby with his expressive nose.
‘I handed the money to Katspaugh and I said, ‘All right, Katspaugh,
don’t pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.’ He shut it then and there.’
Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the
restaurant whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was
starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.
‘Highballs?’ asked the head waiter.
‘This is a nice restaurant here,’ said Mr. Wolfshiem looking at the
Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. ‘But I like across the street better!’
‘Yes, highballs,’ agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: ‘It’s too
hot over there.’
‘Hot and small—yes,’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, ‘but full of memories.’
‘What place is that?’ I asked.
‘The old Metropole.’
‘The old Metropole,’ brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. ‘Filled with
faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget
so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of
us at the table and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was
almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says
somebody wants to speak to him outside. ‘All right,’ says Rosy and
begins to get up and I pulled him down in his chair.
‘Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t you,
so help me, move outside this room.’
‘It was four o’clock in the morning then, and if we’d of raised the
blinds we’d of seen daylight.’
‘Did he go?’ I asked innocently.
‘Sure he went,’—Mr. Wolfshiem’s nose flashed at me indignantly—
‘He turned around in the door and says, ‘Don’t let that waiter take away
my coffee!’ Then he went out on the sidewalk and they shot him three
times in his full belly and drove away.’
‘Four of them were electrocuted,’ I said, remembering.

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‘Five with Becker.’ His nostrils turned to me in an interested way. ‘I

understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion.’
The juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling. Gatsby answered
for me:
‘Oh, no,’ he exclaimed, ‘this isn’t the man!’
‘No?’ Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed.
‘This is just a friend. I told you we’d talk about that some other time.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, ‘I had a wrong man.’
A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more
sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with ferocious
delicacy. His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around the room—
he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people directly behind. I
think that, except for my presence, he would have taken one short glance
beneath our own table.
‘Look here, old sport,’ said Gatsby, leaning toward me, ‘I’m afraid I
made you a little angry this morning in the car.’
There was the smile again, but this time I held out against it.
‘I don’t like mysteries,’ I answered. ‘And I don’t understand why you
won’t come out frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it all got to
come through Miss Baker?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing underhand,’ he assured me. ‘Miss Baker’s a great
sportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all
right.’
Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up and hurried from the
room leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.
‘He has to telephone,’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his
eyes. ‘Fine fellow, isn’t he? Handsome to look at and a perfect
gentleman.’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s an Oggsford man.’
‘Oh!’

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‘He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford

College?’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world.’
‘Have you known Gatsby for a long time?’ I inquired.
‘Several years,’ he answered in a gratified way. ‘I made the pleasure
of his acquaintance just after the war. But I knew I had discovered a man
of fine breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to myself: ‘There’s
the kind of man you’d like to take home and introduce to your mother
and sister.’ ’ He paused. ‘I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.’
I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now. They were composed of
oddly familiar pieces of ivory.
‘Finest specimens of human molars,’ he informed me.
‘Well!’ I inspected them. ‘That’s a very interesting idea.’
‘Yeah.’ He flipped his sleeves up under his coat. ‘Yeah, Gatsby’s very
careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend’s
wife.’
When the subject of this instinctive trust returned to the table and sat
down Mr. Wolfshiem drank his coffee with a jerk and got to his feet.
‘I have enjoyed my lunch,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to run off from you
two young men before I outstay my welcome.’
‘Don’t hurry, Meyer,’ said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. Mr.
Wolfshiem raised his hand in a sort of benediction.
‘You’re very polite but I belong to another generation,’ he announced
solemnly. ‘You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies
and your—’ He supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his
hand—‘As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won’t impose myself on
you any longer.’
As he shook hands and turned away his tragic nose was trembling. I
wondered if I had said anything to offend him.
‘He becomes very sentimental sometimes,’ explained Gatsby. ‘This is
one of his sentimental days. He’s quite a character around New York—
a denizen of Broadway.’
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‘Who is he anyhow—an actor?’

‘No.’
‘A dentist?’
‘Meyer Wolfshiem? 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.’
I insisted on paying the check. As the waiter brought my change I
caught sight of Tom Buchanan across the crowded room.
‘Come along with me for a minute,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to say hello to
someone.’
When he saw us Tom jumped up and took half a dozen steps in our
direction.
‘Where’ve you been?’ he demanded eagerly. ‘Daisy’s furious because
you haven’t called up.’
‘This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan.’
They shook hands briefly and a strained, unfamiliar look of
embarrassment came over Gatsby’s face.
‘How’ve you been, anyhow?’ demanded Tom of me. ‘How’d you
happen to come up this far to eat?’
‘I’ve been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby.’
I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there.
*
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One October day in nineteen-seventeen—

(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight
chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)
—I was walking along from one place to another half on the sidewalks
and half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes
from England with rubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground.
I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind and whenever
this happened the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses
stretched out stiff and said TUT-TUT-TUT-TUT in a disapproving way.
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!’
When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was
beside the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never
seen before. They were so engrossed in each other that she didn’t see me
until I was five feet away.
‘Hello Jordan,’ she called unexpectedly. ‘Please come here.’
I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older
girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross
and make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t
come that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a
way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because
it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His
name was Jay Gatsby and I didn’t lay eyes on him again for over four
years—even after I’d met him on Long Island I didn’t realize it was the
same man.
That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux
myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very
often. She went with a slightly older crowd—when she went with anyone
at all. Wild rumors were circulating about her—how her mother had
found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say
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goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually

prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for several
weeks. After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any more but
only with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town who
couldn’t get into the army at all.
By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut
after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a
man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago
with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He
came down with a hundred people in four private cars and hired a whole
floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her
a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal
dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her
flowered dress—and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of sauterne
in one hand and a letter in the other.
‘ ’Gratulate me,’ she muttered. ‘Never had a drink before but oh, how
I do enjoy it.’
‘What’s the matter, Daisy?’
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 downstairs and
give ’em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ’em all Daisy’s change’
her mine. 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.
But she didn’t say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and
put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress and half an
hour later when we walked out of the room the pearls were around her
neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o’clock she married Tom

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Buchanan without so much as a shiver and started off on a three months’

trip to the South Seas.
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. That was in August. A week after I left Santa
Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and ripped
a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers
too because her arm was broken—she was one of the chambermaids in
the Santa Barbara Hotel.
The next April Daisy had her little girl and they went to France for a
year. I saw them one spring in Cannes and later in Deauville and then
they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago,
as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich
and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation. Perhaps
because she doesn’t drink. It’s a great advantage not to drink among
hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can
time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind
that they don’t see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at
all—and yet there’s something in that voice of hers …
Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first
time in years. It was when I asked you—do you remember?—if you
knew Gatsby in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my
room and woke me up, and said ‘What Gatsby?’ and when I described
him—I was half asleep—she said in the strangest voice that it must be
the man she used to know. It wasn’t until then that I connected this
Gatsby with the officer in her white car.
*
When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza
for half an hour and were driving in a Victoria through Central Park. The
sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the
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West Fifties and the clear voices of children, already gathered like
crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:

‘I’m the Sheik of Araby,

Your love belongs to me.
At night when you’re are asleep,
Into your tent I’ll creep—’
‘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.
‘He wants to know—’ continued Jordan ‘—if you’ll invite Daisy to
your house some afternoon and then let him come over.’
The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and
bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths so that
he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.
‘Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?’
‘He’s afraid. He’s waited so long. He thought you might be offended.
You see he’s regular tough underneath it all.’
Something worried me.
‘Why didn’t he ask you to arrange a meeting?’
‘He wants her to see his house,’ she explained. ‘And your house is
right next door.’
‘Oh!’
‘I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some
night,’ went on Jordan, ‘but she never did. Then he began asking people
casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. It was that
night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate
way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately suggested a luncheon
in New York—and I thought he’d go mad:
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‘I don’t want to do anything out of the way!’ he kept saying. ‘I want

to see her right next door.’
‘When I said you were a particular 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.’
It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm
around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her
to dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but
of this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and
who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began
to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: ‘There are only the
pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.’
‘And Daisy ought to have something in her life,’ murmured Jordan to
me.
‘Does she want to see Gatsby?’
‘She’s not to know about it. Gatsby doesn’t want her to know. You’re
just supposed to invite her to tea.’
We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the façade of Fifty-ninth
Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park. 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.

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Chapter 5
When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment
that my house was on fire. Two o’clock and the whole corner of the
peninsula was blazing with light which fell unreal on the shrubbery and
made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner I
saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar.
At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved
itself into ‘hide-and-go-seek’ or ‘sardines-in-the-box’ with all the house
thrown open to the game. But there wasn’t a sound. Only wind in the
trees which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on again as if
the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I saw
Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.
‘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.’
He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness.
‘I talked with Miss Baker,’ I said after a moment. ‘I’m going to call
up Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he said carelessly. ‘I don’t want to put you to any
trouble.’
‘What day would suit you?’
‘What day would suit you?’ he corrected me quickly. ‘I don’t want to
put you to any trouble, you see.’
‘How about the day after tomorrow?’ He considered for a moment.
Then, with reluctance:
‘I want to get the grass cut,’ he said.

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We both looked at the grass—there was a sharp line where my ragged

lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected
that he meant my grass.
‘There’s another little thing,’ he said uncertainly, and hesitated.
‘Would you rather put it off for a few days?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it isn’t about that. At least—’ He fumbled with a series of
beginnings. ‘Why, I thought—why, look here, old sport, you don’t make
much money, do you?’
‘Not very much.’
This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.
‘I thought you didn’t, if you’ll pardon my—you see, I carry on a little
business on the side, a sort of sideline, you understand. And I thought
that if you don’t make very much—You’re selling bonds, aren’t you, old
sport?’
‘Trying to.’
‘Well, this would interest you. 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.
‘I’ve got my hands full,’ I said. ‘I’m much obliged but I couldn’t take
on any more work.’
‘You wouldn’t have to do any business with Wolfshiem.’ Evidently
he thought that I was shying away from the ‘gonnegtion’ mentioned at
lunch, but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer,
hoping I’d begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive,
so he went unwillingly home.
The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked
into a deep sleep as I entered my front door. So I didn’t know whether or
not Gatsby went to Coney Island or for how many hours he ‘glanced into

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rooms’ while his house blazed gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the
office next morning and invited her to come to tea.
‘Don’t bring Tom,’ I warned her.
‘What?’
‘Don’t bring Tom.’
‘Who is ‘Tom’?’ she asked innocently.
The day agreed upon was pouring rain. At eleven o’clock a man in a
raincoat dragging a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that
Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This reminded me that I
had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back so I drove into West Egg
Village to search for her among soggy white-washed alleys and to buy
some cups and lemons and flowers.
The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o’clock a greenhouse arrived
from Gatsby’s, with innumerable receptacles to contain it. An hour later
the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby in a white flannel suit, silver
shirt and gold-colored tie hurried in. He was pale and there were dark
signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.
‘Is everything all right?’ he asked immediately.
‘The grass looks fine, if that’s what you mean.’
‘What grass?’ he inquired blankly. ‘Oh, the grass in the yard.’ He
looked out the window at it, but judging from his expression I don’t
believe he saw a thing.
‘Looks very good,’ he remarked vaguely. ‘One of the papers said they
thought the rain would stop about four. I think it was ‘The Journal.’ Have
you got everything you need in the shape of—of tea?’
I took him into the pantry where he looked a little reproachfully at the
Finn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the
delicatessen shop.
‘Will they do?’ I asked.
‘Of course, of course! They’re fine!’ and he added hollowly, ‘… old
sport.’
The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist through which
occasional thin drops swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyes
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through a copy of Clay’s ‘Economics,’ starting at the Finnish tread that

shook the kitchen floor and peering toward the bleared windows from
time to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were
taking place outside. Finally he got up and informed me in an uncertain
voice that he was going home.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Nobody’s coming to tea. It’s too late!’ He looked at his watch as if
there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. ‘I can’t wait all
day.’
‘Don’t be silly; it’s just two minutes to four.’
He sat down, miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously
there was the sound of a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped up
and, a little harrowed myself, I went out into the yard.
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 me with a bright ecstatic smile.
‘Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?’
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had
to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone
before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of
blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops
as I took it to help her from the car.
‘Are you in love with me,’ she said low in my ear. ‘Or why did I have
to come alone?’
‘That’s the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far
away and spend an hour.’
‘Come back in an hour, Ferdie.’ Then in a grave murmur, ‘His name
is Ferdie.’
‘Does the gasoline affect his nose?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said innocently. ‘Why?’
We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living room was
deserted.
‘Well, that’s funny!’ I exclaimed.
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‘What’s funny?’
She turned her head as there was a light, dignified knocking at the
front door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands
plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of
water glaring tragically into my eyes.
With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the hall,
turned sharply as if he were on a wire and disappeared into the living
room. It wasn’t a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my own heart
I pulled the door to against the increasing rain.
For half a minute there wasn’t a sound. Then from the living room I
heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh followed by Daisy’s
voice on a clear artificial note.
‘I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.’
A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall so I went
into the room.
Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the
mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom.
His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct
mantelpiece clock and from this position his distraught eyes stared down
at Daisy who was sitting frightened but graceful on the edge of a stiff
chair.
‘We’ve met before,’ muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily
at me and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the
clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head,
whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back
in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and
his chin in his hand.
‘I’m sorry about the clock,’ he said.
My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I couldn’t muster
up a single commonplace out of the thousand in my head.
‘It’s an old clock,’ I told them idiotically.
I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on
the floor.

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‘We haven’t met for many years,’ said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-
fact as it could ever be.
‘Five years next November.’
The automatic quality of Gatsby’s answer set us all back at least
another minute. I had them both on their feet with the desperate
suggestion that they help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac
Finn brought it in on a tray.
Amid the welcome confusion of cups and cakes a certain physical
decency established itself. Gatsby got himself into a shadow and while
Daisy and I talked looked conscientiously from one to the other of us
with tense unhappy eyes. However, as calmness wasn’t an end in itself I
made an excuse at the first possible moment and got to my feet.
‘Where are you going?’ demanded Gatsby in immediate alarm.
‘I’ll be back.’
‘I’ve got to speak to you about something before you go.’
He followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the door and
whispered: ‘Oh, God!’ in a miserable way.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘This is a terrible mistake,’ he said, shaking his head from side to side,
‘a terrible, terrible mistake.’
‘You’re just embarrassed, that’s all,’ and luckily I added: ‘Daisy’s
embarrassed too.’
‘She’s embarrassed?’ he repeated incredulously.
‘Just as much as you are.’
‘Don’t talk so loud.’
‘You’re acting like a little boy,’ I broke out impatiently. ‘Not only that
but you’re rude. Daisy’s sitting in there all alone.’
He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable
reproach and opening the door cautiously went back into the other room.
I walked out the back way—just as Gatsby had when he had made his
nervous circuit of the house half an hour before— and ran for a huge
black knotted tree whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain.
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Once more it was pouring and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by

Gatsby’s gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric
marshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except
Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple,
for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the ‘period’ craze, a decade
before, and there was a story that he’d agreed to pay five years’ taxes on
all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched
with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found
a Family—he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his
house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while
occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being
peasantry.
After half an hour the sun shone again and the grocer’s automobile
rounded Gatsby’s drive with the raw material for his servants’ dinner—
I felt sure he wouldn’t eat a spoonful. A maid began opening the upper
windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each, and, leaning from
a large central bay, spat meditatively into the garden. It was time I went
back. While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their
voices, rising and swelling a little, now and then with gusts of emotion.
But in the new silence I felt that silence had fallen within the house too.
I went in—after making every possible noise in the kitchen short of
pushing over the stove—but I don’t believe they heard a sound. They
were sitting at either end of the couch looking at each other as if some
question had been asked or was in the air, and every vestige of
embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears and when
I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief
before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply
confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of
exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.
‘Oh, hello, old sport,’ he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I
thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.
‘It’s stopped raining.’
‘Has it?’ When he realized what I was talking about, that there were
twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, like

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an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to Daisy.

‘What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining.’
‘I’m glad, Jay.’ Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only
of her unexpected joy.
‘I want you and Daisy to come over to my house,’ he said, ‘I’d like to
show her around.’
‘You’re sure you want me to come?’
‘Absolutely, old sport.’
Daisy went upstairs to wash her face—too late I thought with
humiliation of my towels—while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.
‘My house looks well, doesn’t it?’ he demanded. ‘See how the whole
front of it catches the light.’
I agreed that it was splendid.
‘Yes.’ His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. ‘It
took me just three years to earn the money that bought it.’
‘I thought you inherited your money.’
‘I did, old sport,’ he said automatically, ‘but I lost most of it in the big
panic—the panic of the war.’
I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what
business he was in he answered ‘That’s my affair,’ before he realized that
it wasn’t the appropriate reply.
‘Oh, I’ve been in several things,’ he corrected himself. ‘I was in the
drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I’m not in either one
now.’ He looked at me with more attention. ‘Do you mean you’ve been
thinking over what I proposed the other night?’
Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of
brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.
‘That huge place there?’ she cried pointing.
‘Do you like it?’
‘I love it, but I don’t see how you live there all alone.’
‘I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who
do interesting things. Celebrated people.’
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Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down the road
and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired
this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the
gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn
and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It was
strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in and
out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees.
And inside as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music rooms
and Restoration salons I felt that there were guests concealed behind
every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had
passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of ‘the Merton College
Library’ I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly
laughter.
We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and
lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and
poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths—intruding into one
chamber where a disheveled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises
on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the ‘boarder.’ I had seen him
wandering hungrily about the beach that morning. Finally we came to
Gatsby’s own apartment, a bedroom and a bath and an Adam study,
where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a
cupboard in the wall.
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—’

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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 overwound clock.
Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent
cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and
his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.
‘I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a
selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.’
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one
before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost
their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray.
While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted
higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green
and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. 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
thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such
beautiful shirts before.’
*
After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming pool,
and the hydroplane and the midsummer 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

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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.
I began to walk about the room, examining various indefinite objects
in the half darkness. A large photograph of an elderly man in yachting
costume attracted me, hung on the wall over his desk.
‘Who’s this?’
‘That? That’s Mr. Dan Cody, old sport.’
The name sounded faintly familiar.
‘He’s dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago.’
There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting costume, on the
bureau—Gatsby with his head thrown back defiantly—taken apparently
when he was about eighteen.
‘I adore it!’ exclaimed Daisy. ‘The pompadour! You never told me
you had a pompadour—or a yacht.’
‘Look at this,’ said Gatsby quickly. ‘Here’s a lot of clippings— about
you.’
They stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask to see the
rubies when the phone rang and Gatsby took up the receiver.
‘Yes…. Well, I can’t talk now…. I can’t talk now, old sport…. I said
a small town…. He must know what a small town is…. Well, he’s no use
to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town …’
He rang off.
‘Come here quick!’ cried Daisy at the window.
The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and
there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.
‘Look at that,’ she whispered, and then after a moment: ‘I’d like to
just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.’
I tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence
made them feel more satisfactorily alone.
‘I know what we’ll do,’ said Gatsby, ‘we’ll have Klipspringer play the
piano.’
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He went out of the room calling ‘Ewing!’ and returned in a few

minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with
shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blonde hair. He was now decently
clothed in a ‘sport shirt’ open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of
a nebulous hue.
‘Did we interrupt your exercises?’ inquired Daisy politely.
‘I was asleep,’ cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment.
‘That is, I’d been asleep. Then I got up….’
‘Klipspringer plays the piano,’ said Gatsby, cutting him off. ‘Don’t
you, Ewing, old sport?’
‘I don’t play well. I don’t—I hardly play at all. I’m all out of prac—’
‘We’ll go downstairs,’ interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The
grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.
In the music room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano.
He lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her
on a couch far across the room where there was no light save what the
gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.
When Klipspringer had played ‘The Love Nest’ he turned around on
the bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.
‘I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play. I’m all out
of prac——’
‘Don’t talk so much, old sport,’ commanded Gatsby. ‘Play!’

‘In the morning,

In the evening,
Ain’t we got fun——’
Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along
the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric
trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New
York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was
generating on the air.

One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer

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The rich get richer and the poor get—children.

In the meantime,
In between time—
As I went over to say good-bye 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. It had gone beyond her,
beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion,
adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that
drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man
will store up in his ghostly heart.
As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took
hold of hers and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward
her with a rush of emotion. 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.
They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand;
Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they
looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out
of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there
together.

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Chapter 6
About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived
one morning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything to say.
‘Anything to say about what?’ inquired Gatsby politely.
‘Why,—any statement to give out.’
It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard
Gatsby’s name around his office in a connection which he either
wouldn’t reveal or didn’t fully understand. This was his day off and with
laudable (admirable) initiative he had hurried out ‘to see.’
It was a random shot, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right. Gatsby’s
notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality
and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he
fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the
‘underground pipe-line to Canada’ attached themselves to him, and there
was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat
that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long
Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to
James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to say.
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 (deceptive) 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.
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 (deceptive) beauty. So he

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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
(stimulating) 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-absorption he took for granted.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and
fantastic conceits (vanities) haunted him in his bed at night. A universe
of ineffable (inexpressible) gaudiness (showiness) spun itself out in his
brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with
wet light his tangled (twisted) 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’s 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
(concierge)’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
along shore.
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 (full-bodied) 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 (flavorful) ramifications
(consequences) by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played
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Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht,

were common knowledge to the turgid (pretentious) 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 Girl Bay.
To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed
deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamor 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 (stimulated) 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 (unrestrained) doings Dan
Cody drunk might soon be about and he provided for such contingencies
(eventualities) 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.
I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby’s bedroom, a grey, florid
(flowery) man with a hard empty face—the pioneer debauchee
(degraded) who during one phase of American life brought back to the
eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon
(tavern). It was indirectly due to Cody that Gatsby drank so little.
Sometimes in the course of gay parties women used to rub champagne
into his hair; for himself he formed the habit of letting liquor alone.
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 (unbroken) 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.

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He told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with the
idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his antecedents, which
weren’t even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a time of
confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and
nothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, while Gatsby,
so to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set of misconceptions away.
It was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. For several weeks
I didn’t see him or hear his voice on the phone—mostly I was in New
York, trotting (scampering) around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate
(get in) myself with her senile (disorientated) aunt— but finally I went
over to his house one Sunday afternoon. I hadn’t been there two minutes
when somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. I was startled,
naturally, but the really surprising thing was that it hadn’t happened
before.
They were a party of three on horseback—Tom and a man named
Sloane and a pretty woman in a brown riding habit who had been there
previously.
‘I’m delighted to see you,’ said Gatsby, standing on his porch. ‘I’m
delighted that you dropped in.’
As though they cared!
‘Sit right down. Have a cigarette or a cigar.’ He walked around the
room quickly, ringing bells. ‘I’ll have something to drink for you in just
a minute.’
He was profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But he
would be uneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing
in a vague way that that was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted
nothing. A lemonade? No, thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at all,
thanks… I’m sorry—’
‘Did you have a nice ride?’
‘Very good roads around here.’
‘I suppose the automobiles—’
‘Yeah.’
Moved by an irresistible impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom who had
accepted the introduction as a stranger.
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‘I believe we’ve met somewhere before, Mr. Buchanan.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Tom, gruffly (sullenly) polite but obviously not
remembering. ‘So we did. I remember very well.’
‘About two weeks ago.’
‘That’s right. You were with Nick here.’
‘I know your wife,’ continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.
‘That so?’
Tom turned to me.
‘You live near here, Nick?’
‘Next door.’
‘That so?’
Mr. Sloane didn’t enter into the conversation but lounged (reclined)
back haughtily in his chair; the woman said nothing either—until
unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.
‘We’ll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby,’ she suggested.
‘What do you say?’
‘Certainly. I’d be delighted to have you.’
‘Be ver’ nice,’ said Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. ‘Well— think ought
to be starting home.’
‘Please don’t hurry,’ Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself
now and he wanted to see more of Tom. ‘Why don’t you—why don’t
you stay for supper? I wouldn’t be surprised if some other people
dropped in from New York.’
‘You come to supper with me,’ said the lady enthusiastically.
‘Both of you.’
This included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet.
‘Come along,’ he said—but to her only.
‘I mean it,’ she insisted. ‘I’d love to have you. Lots of room.’
Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go and he didn’t see
that Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn’t.
‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to,’ I said.
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‘Well, you come,’ she urged, concentrating on Gatsby.

Mr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear.
‘We won’t be late if we start now,’ she insisted aloud.
‘I haven’t got a horse,’ said Gatsby. ‘I used to ride in the army but I’ve
never bought a horse. I’ll have to follow you in my car. Excuse me for
just a minute.’
The rest of us walked out on the porch, where Sloane and the lady
began an impassioned (heated) conversation aside.
‘My God, I believe the man’s coming,’ said Tom. ‘Doesn’t he know
she doesn’t want him?’
‘She says she does want him.’
‘She has a big dinner party and he won’t know a soul there.’ He
frowned. ‘I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be
old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days
to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.’
Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted
their horses.
‘Come on,’ said Mr. Sloane to Tom, ‘we’re late. We’ve got to go.’
And then to me: ‘Tell him we couldn’t wait, will you?’
Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod and they
trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August foliage
just as Gatsby with hat and light overcoat in hand came out the front
door.
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 (turmoil), 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,
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through Daisy’s eyes. It is invariably (consistently) saddening to look

through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own
powers of adjustment.
They arrived at twilight and as we strolled out among the sparkling
hundreds Daisy’s voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.
‘These things excite me so,’ she whispered. ‘If you want to kiss me
any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I’ll be glad to
arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card. I’m
giving out green——’
‘Look around,’ suggested Gatsby.
‘I’m looking around. I’m having a marvelous—’
‘You must see the faces of many people you’ve heard about.’
Tom’s arrogant eyes roamed the crowd.
‘We don’t go around very much,’ he said. ‘In fact I was just thinking
I don’t know a soul here.’
‘Perhaps you know that lady.’ Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely
human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree. Tom
and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the
recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.
‘She’s lovely,’ said Daisy.
‘The man bending over her is her director.’
He took them ceremoniously from group to group:
‘Mrs. Buchanan … and Mr. Buchanan—’ After an instant’s hesitation
he added: ‘the polo player.’
‘Oh no,’ objected Tom quickly, ‘Not me.’
But evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby for Tom remained ‘the
polo player’ for the rest of the evening.
‘I’ve never met so many celebrities!’ Daisy exclaimed. ‘I liked that
man—what was his name?—with the sort of blue nose.’
Gatsby identified him, adding that he was a small producer.
‘Well, I liked him anyhow.’

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‘I’d a little rather not be the polo player,’ said Tom pleasantly, ‘I’d
rather look at all these famous people in—in oblivion (forgetfulness).’
Daisy and Gatsby danced. I remember being surprised by his graceful,
conservative fox-trot—I had never seen him dance before. Then they
sauntered (strolled) over to my house and sat on the steps for half an
hour while at her request I remained watchfully in the garden: ‘In case
there’s a fire or a flood,’ she explained, ‘or any act of God.’
Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper
together. ‘Do you mind if I eat with some people over here?’ he said. ‘A
fellow’s getting off some funny stuff.’
‘Go ahead,’ answered Daisy genially, ‘And if you want to take down
any addresses here’s my little gold pencil …’ She looked around after a
moment and told me the girl was ‘common but pretty,’ and I knew that
except for the half hour she’d been alone with Gatsby she wasn’t having
a good time.
We were at a particularly tipsy table. That was my fault—Gatsby had
been called to the phone and I’d enjoyed these same people only two
weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic (putrefying)
on the air now.
‘How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?’
The girl addressed was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump (collapse)
against my shoulder. At this inquiry she sat up and opened her eyes.
‘Wha?’
A massive and lethargic (exhausted) woman, who had been urging
Daisy to play golf with her at the local club tomorrow, spoke in Miss
Baedeker’s defence:
‘Oh, she’s all right now. When she’s had five or six cocktails she
always starts screaming like that. I tell her she ought to leave it alone.’
‘I do leave it alone,’ affirmed the accused hollowly.
‘We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: ‘There’s somebody
that needs your help, Doc.’’
‘She’s much obliged, I’m sure,’ said another friend, without gratitude.
‘But you got her dress all wet when you stuck her head in the pool.’

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‘Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool,’ mumbled Miss

Baedeker. ‘They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey.’
‘Then you ought to leave it alone,’ countered Doctor Civet.
‘Speak for yourself!’ cried Miss Baedeker violently. ‘Your hand
shakes. I wouldn’t let you operate on me!’
It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember was standing with
Daisy and watching the moving picture director and his Star. They were
still under the white plum tree and their faces were touching except for a
pale thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he had been
very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and
even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her
cheek.
‘I like her,’ said Daisy, ‘I think she’s lovely.’
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
(understatements) and by the too conspicuous (conspicuous) 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.
I sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. It was
dark here in front: only the bright door sent ten square feet of light
volleying (kicking) out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow
moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another
shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged (beautified)
and powdered in an invisible glass.
‘Who is this Gatsby anyhow?’ demanded Tom suddenly. ‘Some big
bootlegger?’
‘Where’d you hear that?’ I inquired.
‘I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are just
big bootleggers, you know.’
‘Not Gatsby,’ I said shortly.
He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched under
his feet.
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‘Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie

(wildlife park) together.’
A breeze stirred the grey haze of Daisy’s fur collar.
‘At least they’re more interesting than the people we know,’ she said
with an effort.
‘You didn’t look so interested.’
‘Well, I was.’
Tom laughed and turned to me.
‘Did you notice Daisy’s face when that girl asked her to put her under
a cold shower?’
Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper,
bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and
would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up
sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change
tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.
‘Lots of people come who haven’t been invited,’ she said suddenly.
‘That girl hadn’t been invited. They simply force their way in and he’s
too polite to object.’
‘I’d like to know who he is and what he does,’ insisted Tom. ‘And I
think I’ll make a point of finding out.’
‘I can tell you right now,’ she answered. ‘He owned some drug stores,
a lot of drug stores. He built them up himself.’
The dilatory (tardy) limousine came rolling up the drive.
‘Good night, Nick,’ said Daisy.
Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps where ‘Three
o’clock in the Morning,’ a neat, sad little waltz (breeze) of that year, was
drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby’s
party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world.
What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back
inside? What would happen now in the dim incalculable hours? Perhaps
some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be
marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh

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glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot

(discolour) out those five years of unwavering (steadfast) devotion.
I stayed late that night. Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free and
I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had run up,
chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights were
extinguished in the guest rooms overhead. When he came down the steps
at last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face, and his eyes
were bright and tired.
‘She didn’t like it,’ he said immediately.
‘Of course she did.’
‘She didn’t like it,’ he insisted. ‘She didn’t have a good time.’
He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression.
‘I feel far away from her,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to make her understand.’
‘You mean about the dance?’
‘The dance?’ He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of
his fingers. ‘Old sport, the dance is unimportant.’
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and
say: ‘I never loved you.’ After she had obliterated three 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.
‘And she doesn’t understand,’ he said. ‘She used to be able to
understand. We’d sit for hours—’
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit
rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.
‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the
past.’
‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you
can!’
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the
shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

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‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,’ he said,
nodding determinedly. ‘She’ll see.’
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover
something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving
Daisy. 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, and they came to a place where
there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They
stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with
that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the
year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness
and there was a stir and bustle (activity) among the stars. Out of the
corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk 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.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his
own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his
unutterable visions to her perishable (delicate) breath, his mind would
never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a
moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then
he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and
the incarnation was complete.
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.

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Chapter 7
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 was over. Only gradually did I become
aware that the automobiles which turned expectantly into his drive stayed
for just a minute and then drove sulkily away. Wondering if he were sick
I went over to find out—an unfamiliar butler with a villainous face
squinted at me suspiciously from the door.
‘Is Mr. Gatsby sick?’
‘Nope.’ After a pause he added ‘sir’ in a dilatory, grudging way.
‘I hadn’t seen him around, and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr.
Carraway came over.’
‘Who?’ he demanded rudely.
‘Carraway.’
‘Carraway. All right, I’ll tell him.’ Abruptly he slammed the door.
My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his
house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never
went into West Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but ordered
moderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that the
kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was
that the new people weren’t servants at all.
Next day Gatsby called me on the phone.
‘Going away?’ I inquired.
‘No, old sport.’
‘I hear you fired all your servants.’
‘I wanted somebody who wouldn’t gossip. Daisy comes over quite
often—in the afternoons.’
So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the
disapproval in her eyes.
‘They’re some people Wolfshiem wanted to do something for.
They’re all brothers and sisters. They used to run a small hotel.’
‘I see.’
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He was calling up at Daisy’s request—would I come to lunch at her

house tomorrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an hour later Daisy
herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was coming.
Something was up. And yet I couldn’t believe that they would choose
this occasion for a scene—especially for the rather harrowing scene that
Gatsby had outlined in the garden.
The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of
the summer. As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the
hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush
at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion;
the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her white
shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers,
lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. Her pocket-book
slapped to the floor.
‘Oh, my!’ she gasped.
I picked it up with a weary bend and handed it back to her, holding it
at arm’s length and by the extreme tip of the corners to indicate that I had
no designs upon it—but every one near by, including the woman,
suspected me just the same.
‘Hot!’ said the conductor to familiar faces. ‘Some weather! Hot! Hot!
Hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it … ?’
My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his
hand. That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed,
whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!
… Through the hall of the Buchanans’ house blew a faint wind,
carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as we
waited at the door.
‘The master’s body!’ roared the butler into the mouthpiece. ‘I’m sorry,
madame, but we can’t furnish it—it’s far too hot to touch this noon!’
What he really said was: ‘Yes … yes … I’ll see.’
He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to
take our stiff straw hats.

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‘Madame expects you in the salon!’ he cried, needlessly indicating the

direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common
store of life.
The room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool. Daisy and
Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols, weighing down
their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.
‘We can’t move,’ they said together.
Jordan’s fingers, powdered white over their tan, rested for a moment
in mine.
‘And Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the athlete?’ I inquired.
Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled, husky, at the hall
telephone.
Gatsby stood in the center of the crimson carpet and gazed around with
fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed, her sweet, exciting
laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into the air.
‘The rumor is,’ whispered Jordan, ‘that that’s Tom’s girl on the
telephone.’
We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance. ‘Very
well, then, I won’t sell you the car at all … I’m under no obligations to
you at all … And as for your bothering me about it at lunch time I won’t
stand that at all!’
‘Holding down the receiver,’ said Daisy cynically.
‘No, he’s not,’ I assured her. ‘It’s a bona-fide deal. I happen to know
about it.’
Tom flung open the door, blocked out its space for a moment with his
thick body, and hurried into the room.
‘Mr. Gatsby!’ He put out his broad, flat hand with well concealed
dislike. ‘I’m glad to see you, sir … Nick …’
‘Make us a cold drink,’ cried Daisy.
As he left the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and
pulled his face down kissing him on the mouth.
‘You know I love you,’ she murmured.

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‘You forget there’s a lady present,’ said Jordan.

Daisy looked around doubtfully.
‘You kiss Nick too.’
‘What a low, vulgar girl!’
‘I don’t care!’ cried Daisy and began to clog on the brick fireplace.
Then she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch just as
a freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room.
‘Bles-sed pre-cious,’ she crooned, holding out her arms. ‘Come to
your own mother that loves you.’
The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and
rooted shyly into her mother’s dress.
‘The Bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowy
hair? Stand up now, and say How-de-do.’
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.
‘I got dressed before luncheon,’ said the child, turning eagerly to
Daisy.
‘That’s because your mother wanted to show you off.’ Her face bent
into the single wrinkle of the small white neck. ‘You dream, you. You
absolute little dream.’
‘Yes,’ admitted the child calmly. ‘Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress
too.’
‘How do you like mother’s friends?’ Daisy turned her around so that
she faced Gatsby. ‘Do you think they’re pretty?’
‘Where’s Daddy?’
‘She doesn’t look like her father,’ explained Daisy. ‘She looks like
me. She’s got my hair and shape of the face.’
Daisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held
out her hand.
‘Come, Pammy.’
‘Goodbye, sweetheart!’
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With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to

her nurse’s hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back,
preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.
Gatsby took up his drink.
‘They certainly look cool,’ he said, with visible tension.
We drank in long greedy swallows.
‘I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,’ said Tom
genially. ‘It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun—
or wait a minute—it’s just the opposite—the sun’s getting colder every
year.
‘Come outside,’ he suggested to Gatsby, ‘I’d like you to have a look
at the place.’
I went with them out to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in
the heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby’s
eyes followed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the
bay.
‘I’m right across from you.’
‘So you are.’
Our eyes lifted over the rosebeds and the hot lawn and the weedy
refuse of the dog days along shore. Slowly the white wings of the boat
moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped
ocean and the abounding blessed isles.
‘There’s sport for you,’ said Tom, nodding. ‘I’d like to be out there
with him for about an hour.’
We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened too against the heat,
and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale.
‘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.’
‘But it’s so hot,’ insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, ‘And
everything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town!’

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Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, moulding
its senselessness into forms.
‘I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable,’ Tom was saying to
Gatsby, ‘but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage.’
‘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 someone he knew a long
time ago.
‘You resemble the advertisement of the man,’ she went on innocently.
‘You know the advertisement of the man——’
‘All right,’ broke in Tom quickly, ‘I’m perfectly willing to go to town.
Come on—we’re all going to town.’
He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No one
moved.
‘Come on!’ His temper cracked a little. ‘What’s the matter, anyhow?
If we’re going to town let’s start.’
His hand, trembling with his effort at self control, bore to his lips the
last of his glass of ale. Daisy’s voice got us to our feet and out on to the
blazing gravel drive.
‘Are we just going to go?’ she objected. ‘Like this? Aren’t we going
to let anyone smoke a cigarette first?’
‘Everybody smoked all through lunch.’
‘Oh, let’s have fun,’ she begged him. ‘It’s too hot to fuss.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Have it your own way,’ she said. ‘Come on, Jordan.’
They went upstairs to get ready while we three men stood there
shuffling the hot pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the moon
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hovered already in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed his
mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly.
‘Have you got your stables here?’ asked Gatsby with an effort.
‘About a quarter of a mile down the road.’
‘Oh.’
A pause.
‘I don’t see the idea of going to town,’ broke out Tom savagely.
‘Women get these notions in their heads—’
‘Shall we take anything to drink?’ called Daisy from an upper window.
‘I’ll get some whiskey,’ answered Tom. He went inside.
Gatsby turned to me rigidly:
‘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 …
Tom came out of the house wrapping a quart bottle in a towel,
followed by Daisy and Jordan wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth
and carrying light capes over their arms.
‘Shall we all go in my car?’ suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green
leather of the seat. ‘I ought to have left it in the shade.’
‘Is it standard shift?’ demanded Tom.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you take my coupé and let me drive your car to town.’
The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.
‘I don’t think there’s much gas,’ he objected.

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‘Plenty of gas,’ said Tom boisterously. He looked at the gauge. ‘And

if it runs out I can stop at a drug store. You can buy anything at a drug
store nowadays.’
A pause followed this apparently pointless remark. Daisy looked at
Tom frowning and an indefinable expression, at once definitely
unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described
in words, passed over Gatsby’s face.
‘Come on, Daisy,’ said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward
Gatsby’s car. ‘I’ll take you in this circus wagon.’
He opened the door but she moved out from the circle of his arm.
‘You take Nick and Jordan. We’ll follow you in the coupé.’
She walked close to Gatsby, touching his coat with her hand. Jordan
and Tom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby’s car, Tom pushed the
unfamiliar gears tentatively and we shot off into the oppressive heat
leaving them out of sight behind.
‘Did you see that?’ demanded Tom.
‘See what?’
He looked at me keenly, realizing that Jordan and I must have known
all along.
‘You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you?’ he suggested. ‘Perhaps I am,
but I have a—almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to do.
Maybe you don’t believe that, but science—’
He paused. The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him
back from the edge of the theoretical abyss.
‘I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow,’ he continued. ‘I could
have gone deeper if I’d known—’
‘Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?’ inquired Jordan
humorously.
‘What?’ Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. ‘A medium?’
‘About Gatsby.’
‘About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small
investigation of his past.’

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‘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!’
We were all irritable now with the fading ale and, aware of it, we drove
for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded eyes came
into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby’s caution about gasoline.
‘We’ve got enough to get us to town,’ said Tom.
‘But there’s a garage right here,’ objected Jordan. ‘I don’t want to get
stalled in this baking heat.’
Tom threw on both brakes impatiently and we slid to an abrupt dusty
stop under Wilson’s sign. After a moment the proprietor emerged from
the interior of his establishment and gazed hollow-eyed at the car.
‘Let’s have some gas!’ cried Tom roughly. ‘What do you think we
stopped for—to admire the view?’
‘I’m sick,’ said Wilson without moving. ‘I been sick all day.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m all run down.’
‘Well, shall I help myself?’ Tom demanded. ‘You sounded well
enough on the phone.’
With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and,
breathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his face
was green.
‘I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch,’ he said. ‘But I need money
pretty bad and I was wondering what you were going to do with your old
car.’
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 Abstract and Concrete Adjectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

‘How do you like this one?’ inquired Tom. ‘I bought it last week.’
‘It’s a nice yellow one,’ said Wilson, as he strained at the handle.
‘Like to buy it?’
‘Big chance,’ Wilson smiled faintly. ‘No, but I could make some
money on the other.’
‘What do you want money for, all of a sudden?’
‘I’ve been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to go
west.’
‘Your wife does!’ exclaimed Tom, startled.
‘She’s been talking about it for ten years.’ He rested for a moment
against the pump, shading his eyes. ‘And now she’s going whether she
wants to or not. I’m going to get her away.’
The coupé flashed by us with a flurry of dust and the flash of a waving
hand.
‘What do I owe you?’ demanded Tom harshly.
‘I just got wised up to something funny the last two days,’ remarked
Wilson. ‘That’s why I want to get away. That’s why I been bothering you
about the car.’
‘What do I owe you?’
‘Dollar twenty.’
The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had a
bad moment there before I realized that so far his 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.
‘I’ll let you have that car,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll send it over tomorrow
afternoon.’

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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. J.
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. So
engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed and
one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly
developing picture. Her expression was curiously familiar—it was an
expression I had often seen on women’s faces but on Myrtle Wilson’s
face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes,
wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker,
whom she took to be his wife.
*
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we
drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his
mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping
precipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on the accelerator
with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving Wilson behind,
and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour, until, among the
spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of the easygoing blue
coupé.
‘Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,’ suggested Jordan.
‘I love New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away. There’s
something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits
were going to fall into your hands.’
The word ‘sensuous’ had the effect of further disquieting Tom but
before he could invent a protest the coupé came to a stop and Daisy
signalled us to draw up alongside.
‘Where are we going?’ she cried.
‘How about the movies?’

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‘It’s so hot,’ she complained. ‘You go. We’ll ride around and meet
you after.’ With an effort her wit rose faintly, ‘We’ll meet you on some
corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.’
‘We can’t argue about it here,’ Tom said impatiently as a truck gave
out a cursing whistle behind us. ‘You follow me to the south side of
Central Park, in front of the Plaza.’
Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car, and if
the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into sight. I think
he was afraid they would dart down a side street and out of his life
forever.
But they didn’t. And we all took the less explicable step of engaging
the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.
The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into
that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the
course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my
legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back. The
notion originated with Daisy’s suggestion that we hire five bathrooms
and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as ‘a place to
have a mint julep.’ Each of us said over and over that it was a ‘crazy
idea’—we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended
to think, that we were being very funny …
The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four
o’clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from
the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us, fixing
her hair.
‘It’s a swell suite,’ whispered Jordan respectfully and every one
laughed.
‘Open another window,’ commanded Daisy, without turning around.
‘There aren’t any more.’
‘Well, we’d better telephone for an axe—’
‘The thing to do is to forget about the heat,’ said Tom impatiently.
‘You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.’
He unrolled the bottle of whiskey from the towel and put it on the
table.
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‘Why not let her alone, old sport?’ remarked Gatsby. ‘You’re the one
that wanted to come to town.’
There was a moment of silence. The telephone book slipped from its
nail and splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered ‘Excuse
me’—but this time no one laughed.
‘I’ll pick it up,’ I offered.
‘I’ve got it.’ Gatsby examined the parted string, muttered ‘Hum!’ in
an interested way, and tossed the book on a chair.
‘That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?’ said Tom sharply.
‘What is?’
‘All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?’
‘Now see here, Tom,’ said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, ‘if
you’re going to make personal remarks I won’t stay here a minute. Call
up and order some ice for the mint julep.’
As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound
and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn’s
Wedding March from the ballroom below.
‘Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!’ cried Jordan dismally.
‘Still—I was married in the middle of June,’ Daisy remembered,
‘Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?’
‘Biloxi,’ he answered shortly.
‘A man named Biloxi. ‘Blocks’ Biloxi, and he made boxes—that’s a
fact—and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee.’
‘They carried him into my house,’ appended Jordan, ‘because we lived
just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy
told him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died.’ After a
moment she added as if she might have sounded irreverent, ‘There
wasn’t any connection.’
‘I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis,’ I remarked.
‘That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he left.
He gave me an aluminum putter that I use today.’

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The music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer
floated in at the window, followed by intermittent cries of ‘Yea—ea—
ea!’ and finally by a burst of jazz as the dancing began.
‘We’re getting old,’ said Daisy. ‘If we were young we’d rise and
dance.’
‘Remember Biloxi,’ Jordan warned her. ‘Where’d you know him,
Tom?’
‘Biloxi?’ He concentrated with an effort. ‘I didn’t know him. He was
a friend of Daisy’s.’
‘He was not,’ she denied. ‘I’d never seen him before. He came down
in the private car.’
‘Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville. Asa
Bird brought him around at the last minute and asked if we had room for
him.’
Jordan smiled.
‘He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was
president of your class at Yale.’
Tom and I looked at each other blankly.
‘BilOxi?’
‘First place, we didn’t have any president—’
Gatsby’s foot beat a short, restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.
‘By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.’
‘Yes—I went there.’
A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting:
‘You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven.’
Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and
ice but the silence was unbroken by his ‘Thank you’ and the soft closing
of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.
‘I told you I went there,’ said Gatsby.

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‘I heard you, but I’d like to know when.’

‘It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That’s why I
can’t really call myself an Oxford man.’
Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were
all looking at Gatsby.
‘It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the
Armistice,’ he continued. ‘We could go to any of the universities in
England or France.’
I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those
renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.
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.
‘We’re all white here,’ murmured Jordan.
‘I know I’m not very popular. I don’t give big parties. I suppose
you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any
friends—in the modern world.’

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Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he

opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.
‘I’ve got something to tell you, old sport,—’ began Gatsby. But Daisy
guessed at his intention.
‘Please don’t!’ she interrupted helplessly. ‘Please let’s all go home.
Why don’t we all go home?’
‘That’s a good idea.’ I got up. ‘Come on, Tom. Nobody wants a drink.’
‘I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me.’
‘Your wife doesn’t love you,’ said Gatsby. ‘She’s never loved you.
She loves me.’
‘You must be crazy!’ exclaimed Tom automatically.
Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement.
‘She never loved you, do you hear?’ he cried. ‘She only married you
because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible
mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!’
At this point Jordan and I tried to go but Tom and Gatsby insisted with
competitive firmness that we remain—as though neither of them had
anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of
their emotions.
‘Sit down Daisy.’ Tom’s voice groped unsuccessfully for the paternal
note. ‘What’s been going on? I want to hear all about it.’
‘I told you what’s been going on,’ said Gatsby. ‘Going on for five
years—and you didn’t know.’
Tom turned to Daisy sharply.
‘You’ve been seeing this fellow for five years?’
‘Not seeing,’ said Gatsby. ‘No, we couldn’t meet. But both of us loved
each other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used to laugh
sometimes—’ but there was no laughter in his eyes, ‘to think that you
didn’t know.’
‘Oh—that’s all.’ Tom tapped his thick fingers together like a
clergyman and leaned back in his chair.

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‘You’re crazy!’ he exploded. ‘I can’t speak about what happened five

years ago, because I didn’t know Daisy then— and I’ll be damned if I
see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to
the back door. But all the rest of that’s a God Damned lie. Daisy loved
me when she married me and she loves me now.’
‘No,’ said Gatsby, shaking his head.
‘She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideas
in her head and doesn’t know what she’s doing.’ 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.’
Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.
‘Daisy, that’s all over now,’ he said earnestly. ‘It doesn’t matter any
more. Just tell him the truth—that you never loved him—and it’s all
wiped out forever.’
She looked at him blindly. ‘Why,—how could I love him—possibly?’
‘You never loved him.’
She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as
though she realized at last what she was doing— and as though she had
never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now. It
was too late.
‘I never loved him,’ she said, with perceptible reluctance.
‘Not at Kapiolani?’ demanded Tom suddenly.
‘No.’
From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were
drifting up on hot waves of air.
‘Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your
shoes dry?’ There was a husky tenderness in his tone. ‘… Daisy?’

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‘Please don’t.’ Her voice was cold, but the rancour was gone from it.
She looked at Gatsby. ‘There, Jay,’ she said—but her hand as she tried
to light a cigarette was trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette and
the burning match on the carpet.
‘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.
‘Even that’s a lie,’ said Tom savagely. ‘She didn’t know you were
alive. Why,—there’re things between Daisy and me that you’ll never
know, things that neither of us can ever forget.’
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
‘I want to speak to Daisy alone,’ he insisted. ‘She’s all excited now—
’
‘Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom,’ she admitted in a pitiful
voice. ‘It wouldn’t be true.’
‘Of course it wouldn’t,’ agreed Tom.
She turned to her husband.
‘As if it mattered to you,’ she said.
‘Of course it matters. I’m going to take better care of you from now
on.’
‘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.’
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‘I won’t stand this!’ cried Daisy. ‘Oh, please let’s get out.’
‘Who are you, anyhow?’ broke out Tom. ‘You’re one of that bunch
that hangs around with Meyer Wolfshiem—that much I happen to know.
I’ve made a little investigation into your affairs—and I’ll carry it further
tomorrow.’
‘You can suit yourself about that, old sport.’ said Gatsby steadily.
‘I found out what your ‘drug stores’ were.’ He turned to us and spoke
rapidly. ‘He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug stores
here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one
of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him
and I wasn’t far wrong.’
‘What about it?’ said Gatsby politely. ‘I guess your friend Walter
Chase wasn’t too proud to come in on it.’
‘And you left him in the lurch, didn’t you? You let him go to jail for a
month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject
of you.’
‘He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money,
old sport.’
‘Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!’ cried Tom. Gatsby said nothing.
‘Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but Wolfshiem scared
him into shutting his mouth.’
That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby’s
face.
‘That drug store business was just small change,’ continued Tom
slowly, ‘but you’ve got something on now that Walter’s afraid to tell me
about.’
I glanced at Daisy who was staring terrified between Gatsby and her
husband and at Jordan who had begun to balance an invisible but
absorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to Gatsby—
and was startled at his expression. He looked—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.

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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.
‘You two start on home, Daisy,’ said Tom. ‘In Mr. Gatsby’s car.’
She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous
scorn.
‘Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous
little flirtation is over.’
They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental,
isolated, like ghosts even from our pity.
After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle
of whiskey in the towel.
‘Want any of this stuff? Jordan? … Nick?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Nick?’ He asked again.
‘What?’
‘Want any?’
‘No … I just remembered that today’s my birthday.’
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a
new decade.
It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupé 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
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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.
*
The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the
ashheaps was the principal witness at the inquest. He had slept through
the heat until after five, when he strolled over to the garage and found
George Wilson sick in his office—really sick, pale as his own pale hair
and shaking all over. Michaelis advised him to go to bed but Wilson
refused, saying that he’d miss a lot of business if he did. While his
neighbor was trying to persuade him a violent racket broke out overhead.
‘I’ve got my wife locked in up there,’ explained Wilson calmly. ‘She’s
going to stay there till the day after tomorrow and then we’re going to
move away.’
Michaelis was astonished; they had been neighbors for four years and
Wilson had never seemed faintly capable of such a statement. Generally
he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn’t working he sat on a
chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed
along the road. When any one spoke to him he invariably laughed in an
agreeable, colorless way. He was his wife’s man and not his own.
So naturally Michaelis tried to find out what had happened, but Wilson
wouldn’t say a word—instead he began to throw curious, suspicious
glances at his visitor and ask him what he’d been doing at certain times
on certain days. Just as the latter was getting uneasy some workmen came
past the door bound for his restaurant and Michaelis took the opportunity
to get away, intending to come back later. But he didn’t. He supposed he
forgot to, that’s all. When he came outside again a little after seven he
was reminded of the conversation because he heard Mrs. Wilson’s voice,
loud and scolding, downstairs in the garage.

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‘Beat me!’ he heard her cry. ‘Throw me down and beat me, you dirty
little coward!’
A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and
shouting; before he could move from his door the business was over.
The ‘death car’ as the newspapers called it, didn’t stop; it came out of
the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then
disappeared around the next bend.
Michaelis wasn’t even sure of its color—he told the first policeman
that it was light green. The other car, the one going toward New York,
came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back to where
Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and
mingled her thick, dark blood with the dust. 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 so long.
*
We saw the three or four automobiles and the crowd when we were
still some distance away.
‘Wreck!’ said Tom. ‘That’s good. Wilson’ll have a little business at
last.’
He slowed down, but still without any intention of stopping until, as
we came nearer, the hushed intent faces of the people at the garage door
made him automatically put on the brakes.
‘We’ll take a look,’ he said doubtfully, ‘just a look.’
I became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound which issued
incessantly from the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupé
and walked toward the door resolved itself into the words ‘Oh, my God!’
uttered over and over in a gasping moan.
‘There’s some bad trouble here,’ said Tom excitedly.
He reached up on tiptoes and peered over a circle of heads into the
garage which was lit only by a yellow light in a swinging wire basket

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overhead. Then he made a harsh sound in his throat and with a violent
thrusting movement of his powerful arms pushed his way through.
The circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulation; it
was a minute before I could see anything at all. Then new arrivals
disarranged the line and Jordan and I were pushed suddenly inside.
Myrtle Wilson’s body wrapped in a blanket and then in another
blanket as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night lay on a work-
table by the wall and Tom, with his back to us, was bending over it,
motionless. Next to him stood a motorcycle policeman taking down
names with much sweat and correction in a little book. At first I couldn’t
find the source of the high, groaning words that echoed clamorously
through the bare garage—then I saw Wilson standing on the raised
threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to the
doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low voice
and attempting from time to time to lay a hand on his shoulder, but
Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from the
swinging light to the laden table by the wall and then jerk back to the
light again and he gave out incessantly his high horrible call.
‘O, my Ga-od! O, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Gaod!’
Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and after staring around the
garage with glazed eyes addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to the
policeman.
‘M-a-v—’ the policeman was saying, ‘—o—’
‘No,—r—’ corrected the man, ‘M-a-v-r-o—’
‘Listen to me!’ muttered Tom fiercely.
‘r—’ said the policeman, ‘o—’
‘g—’
‘g—’ He looked up as Tom’s broad hand fell sharply on his shoulder.
‘What you want, fella?’
‘What happened—that’s what I want to know!’
‘Auto hit her. Ins’antly killed.’
‘Instantly killed,’ repeated Tom, staring.
‘She ran out ina road. Son-of-a-bitch didn’t even stopus car.’
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‘There was two cars,’ said Michaelis, ‘one comin’, one goin’, see?’
‘Going where?’ asked the policeman keenly.
‘One goin’ each way. Well, she—’ His hand rose toward the blankets
but stopped half way and fell to his side, ‘—she ran out there an’ the one
comin’ from N’York knock right into her goin’ thirty or forty miles an
hour.’
‘What’s the name of this place here?’ demanded the officer.
‘Hasn’t got any name.’
A pale, well-dressed Negro stepped near.
‘It was a yellow car,’ he said, ‘big yellow car. New.’
‘See the accident?’ asked the policeman.
‘No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster’n forty. Going
fifty, sixty.’
‘Come here and let’s have your name. Look out now. I want to get his
name.’
Some words of this conversation must have reached Wilson swaying
in the office door, for suddenly a new theme found voice among his
gasping cries.
‘You don’t have to tell me what kind of car it was! I know what kind
of car it was!’
Watching Tom I saw the wad of muscle back of his shoulder tighten
under his coat. He walked quickly over to Wilson and standing in front
of him seized him firmly by the upper arms.
‘You’ve got to pull yourself together,’ he said with soothing gruffness.
Wilson’s eyes fell upon Tom; he started up on his tiptoes and then
would have collapsed to his knees had not Tom held him upright.
‘Listen,’ said Tom, shaking him a little. ‘I just got here a minute ago,
from New York. I was bringing you that coupé we’ve been talking about.
That yellow car I was driving this afternoon wasn’t mine, do you hear? I
haven’t seen it all afternoon.’

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Only the Negro and I were near enough to hear what he said but the
policeman caught something in the tone and looked over with truculent
eyes.
‘What’s all that?’ he demanded.
‘I’m a friend of his.’ Tom turned his head but kept his hands firm on
Wilson’s body. ‘He says he knows the car that did it…. It was a yellow
car.’
Some dim impulse moved the policeman to look suspiciously at Tom.
‘And what color’s your car?’
‘It’s a blue car, a coupé.’
‘We’ve come straight from New York,’ I said.
Someone who had been driving a little behind us confirmed this and
the policeman turned away.
‘Now, if you’ll let me have that name again correct—’
Picking up Wilson like a doll Tom carried him into the office, set him
down in a chair and came back.
‘If somebody’ll come here and sit with him!’ he snapped
authoritatively. He watched while the two men standing closest glanced
at each other and went unwillingly into the room. Then Tom shut the
door on them and came down the single step, his eyes avoiding the table.
As he passed close to me he whispered ‘Let’s get out.’
Self consciously, with his authoritative arms breaking the way, we
pushed through the still gathering crowd, passing a hurried doctor, case
in hand, who had been sent for in wild hope half an hour ago.
Tom drove slowly until we were beyond the bend—then his foot came
down hard and the coupé raced along through the night. In a little while
I heard a low husky sob and saw that the tears were overflowing down
his face.
‘The God Damn coward!’ he whimpered. ‘He didn’t even stop his
car.’
*

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The Buchanans’ house floated suddenly toward us through the dark

rustling trees. Tom stopped beside the porch and looked up at the second
floor where two windows bloomed with light among the vines.
‘Daisy’s home,’ he said. As we got out of the car he glanced at me and
frowned slightly.
‘I ought to have dropped you in West Egg, Nick. There’s nothing we
can do tonight.’
A change had come over him and he spoke gravely, and with decision.
As we walked across the moonlight gravel to the porch he disposed of
the situation in a few brisk phrases.
‘I’ll telephone for a taxi to take you home, and while you’re waiting
you and Jordan better go in the kitchen and have them get you some
supper—if you want any.’ He opened the door. ‘Come in.’
‘No thanks. But I’d be glad if you’d order me the taxi. I’ll wait
outside.’
Jordan put her hand on my arm.
‘Won’t you come in, Nick?’
‘No thanks.’
I was feeling a little sick and I wanted to be alone. But Jordan lingered
for a moment more.
‘It’s only half past nine,’ she said.
I’d be damned if I’d go in; I’d had enough of all of them for one day
and suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of
this in my expression for she turned abruptly away and ran up the porch
steps into the house. I sat down for a few minutes with my head in my
hands, until I heard the phone taken up inside and the butler’s voice
calling a taxi. Then I walked slowly down the drive away from the house
intending to wait by the gate.
I hadn’t gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped
from between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird by
that time because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his
pink suit under the moon.
‘What are you doing?’ I inquired.
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‘Just standing here, old sport.’

Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation. For all I knew he was
going to rob the house in a moment; I wouldn’t have been surprised to
see sinister faces, the faces of ‘Wolfshiem’s people,’ behind him in the
dark shrubbery.
‘Did you see any trouble on the road?’ he asked after a minute.
‘Yes.’
He hesitated.
‘Was she killed?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. It’s better that the shock should
all come at once. She stood it pretty well.’
He spoke as if Daisy’s reaction was the only thing that mattered.
‘I got to West Egg by a side road,’ he went on, ‘and left the car in my
garage. I don’t think anybody saw us but of course I can’t be sure.’
I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to
tell him he was wrong.
‘Who was the woman?’ he inquired.
‘Her name was Wilson. Her husband owns the garage. How the devil
did it happen?’
‘Well, I tried to swing the wheel—’ He broke off, and suddenly I
guessed at the truth.
‘Was Daisy driving?’
‘Yes,’ he said after a moment, ‘but of course I’ll say I was. You see,
when we left New York she was very nervous and she thought it would
steady her to drive—and this woman rushed out at us just as we were
passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute but it
seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebody
she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the
other car, and then she lost her nerve and turned back. The second my
hand reached the wheel I felt the shock—it must have killed her
instantly.’

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‘It ripped her open—’

‘Don’t tell me, old sport.’ He winced. ‘Anyhow—Daisy stepped on it.
I tried to make her stop, but she couldn’t so I pulled on the emergency
brake. Then she fell over into my lap and I drove on.
‘She’ll be all right tomorrow,’ he said presently. ‘I’m just going to
wait here and see if he tries to bother her about that unpleasantness this
afternoon. She’s locked herself into her room and if he tries any brutality
she’s going to turn the light out and on again.’
‘He won’t touch her,’ I said. ‘He’s not thinking about her.’
‘I don’t trust him, old sport.’
‘How long are you going to wait?’
‘All night if necessary. Anyhow till they all go to bed.’
A new point of view occurred to me. Suppose Tom found out that
Daisy had been driving. He might think he saw a connection in it—he
might think anything. I looked at the house: there were two or three bright
windows downstairs and the pink glow from Daisy’s room on the second
floor.
‘You wait here,’ I said. ‘I’ll see if there’s any sign of a commotion.’
I walked back along the border of the lawn, traversed the gravel softly
and tiptoed up the veranda steps. The drawing-room curtains were open,
and I saw that the room was empty. Crossing the porch where we had
dined that June night three months before I came to a small rectangle of
light which I guessed was the pantry window. The blind was drawn but
I found a rift at the sill.
Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table
with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of ale.
He was talking intently across the table at her and in his earnestness his
hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked
up at him and nodded in agreement.
They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or
the ale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable
air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said
that they were conspiring together.

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As I tiptoed from the porch I heard my taxi feeling its way along the
dark road toward the house. Gatsby was waiting where I had left him in
the drive.
‘Is it all quiet up there?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Yes, it’s all quiet.’ I hesitated. ‘You’d better come home and get some
sleep.’
He shook his head.
‘I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport.’
He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his
scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of
the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the
moonlight—watching over nothing.

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Chapter 8
I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the
Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage
frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive and
immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress—I felt that I had
something to tell him, something to warn him about and morning would
be too late.
Crossing his lawn I saw that his front door was still open and he was
leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.
‘Nothing happened,’ he said wanly. ‘I waited, and about four o’clock
she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out
the light.’
His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night
when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside
curtains that were like pavilions and felt over innumerable feet of dark
wall for electric light switches—once I tumbled with a sort of splash
upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of
dust everywhere and the rooms were musty as though they hadn’t been
aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table with two
stale dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the
drawing-room we sat smoking out into the darkness.
‘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.
It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan
Cody—told it to me because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass
against Tom’s hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played
out. I think that he would have acknowledged anything, now, without
reserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy.

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She was the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed
capacities he had come in contact with such people but always with
indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He
went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then
alone. It amazed him—he had never been in such a beautiful house
before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived
there—it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him.
There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more
beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities
taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty
and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent
of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were
scarcely withered. It excited him too that many men had already loved
Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about
the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant
emotions.
But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident.
However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a
penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible
cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most
of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—
eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had
no real right to touch her hand.
He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under
false pretenses. I don’t mean that he had traded on his phantom millions,
but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe
that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself—that he was
fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact he had no such
facilities—he had no comfortable family standing behind him and he was
liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere
about the world.
But he didn’t despise himself and it didn’t turn out as he had imagined.
He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but now he
found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. He knew
that Daisy was extraordinary but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary

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a ‘nice’ girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full
life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.
When they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless,
who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought
luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she
turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had
caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever
and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that
wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of
Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the
poor.
‘I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old
sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t,
because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I
knew different things from her…. Well, there I was, way off my
ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I
didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better
time telling her what I was going to do?’
On the last afternoon before he went abroad he sat with Daisy in his
arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day with fire in the room
and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his
arm a little and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had
made them tranquil for a while as if to give them a deep memory for the
long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer in their
month of love nor communicated more profoundly one with another than
when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he
touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he
went to the front and following the Argonne battles he got his majority
and the command of the divisional machine guns. After the Armistice he
tried frantically to get home but some complication or misunderstanding
sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now—there was a quality of
nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come.
She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see
him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing
the right thing after all. For Daisy was young and her artificial world was
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redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which

set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness
of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless
comment of the ‘Beale Street Blues’ while a hundred pairs of golden and
silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were
always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while
fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns
around the floor.
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.
That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom
Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his
position and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle
and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at
Oxford.
It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest
of the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey turning, gold
turning light. The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and
ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a slow
pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool lovely
day.
‘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?’
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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?
He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their
wedding trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville
on the last of his army pay. 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. Just as Daisy’s house had always seemed to him more
mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even
though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.
He left feeling that if he had searched harder he might have found
her—that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach—he was penniless
now—was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a
folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar
buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow
trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have
seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.
The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it
sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city
where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately
as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she
had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his
blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and
the best, forever.
It was nine o’clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the
porch. The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there
was an autumn flavor in the air. The gardener, the last one of Gatsby’s
former servants, came to the foot of the steps.
‘I’m going to drain the pool today, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves’ll start falling
pretty soon and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.’
‘Don’t do it today,’ Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically.
‘You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?’

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I looked at my watch and stood up.

‘Twelve minutes to my train.’
I didn’t want to go to the city. I wasn’t worth a decent stroke of work
but it was more than that—I didn’t want to leave Gatsby. I missed that
train, and then another, before I could get myself away.
‘I’ll call you up,’ I said finally.
‘Do, old sport.’
‘I’ll call you about noon.’
We walked slowly down the steps.
‘I suppose Daisy’ll call too.’ He looked at me anxiously as if he hoped
I’d corroborate this.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well—goodbye.’
We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I
remembered something and turned around.
‘They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the
whole damn bunch put together.’
I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever
gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he
nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and
understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all
the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color
against the white steps and I thought of the night when I first came to his
ancestral home three months before. The lawn and drive had been
crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he
had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved
them goodbye.
I thanked him for his hospitality. We were always thanking him for
that—I and the others.
‘Goodbye,’ I called. ‘I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby.’
Up in the city I tried for a while to list the quotations on an
interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel-chair. Just
before noon the phone woke me and I started up with sweat breaking out
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on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker; she often called me up at this hour

because the uncertainty of her own movements between hotels and clubs
and private houses made her hard to find in any other way. Usually her
voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool as if a divot from
a green golf links had come sailing in at the office window but this
morning it seemed harsh and dry.
‘I’ve left Daisy’s house,’ she said. ‘I’m at Hempstead and I’m going
down to Southampton this afternoon.’
Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy’s house, but the act
annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid.
‘You weren’t so nice to me last night.’
‘How could it have mattered then?’
Silence for a moment. Then—
‘However—I want to see you.’
‘I want to see you too.’
‘Suppose I don’t go to Southampton, and come into town this
afternoon?’
‘No—I don’t think this afternoon.’
‘Very well.’
‘It’s impossible this afternoon. Various—’
We talked like that for a while and then abruptly we weren’t talking
any longer. I don’t know which of us hung up with a sharp click but I
know I didn’t care. I couldn’t have talked to her across a tea-table that
day if I never talked to her again in this world.
I called Gatsby’s house a few minutes later, but the line was busy. I
tried four times; finally an exasperated central told me the wire was being
kept open for long distance from Detroit. Taking out my time-table I
drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then I leaned back in my
chair and tried to think. It was just noon.
*
When I passed the ashheaps on the train that morning I had crossed
deliberately to the other side of the car. I suppose there’d be a curious
crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark spots in the
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dust and some garrulous man telling over and over what had happened
until it became less and less real even to him and he could tell it no longer
and Myrtle Wilson’s tragic achievement was forgotten. Now I want to
go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there
the night before.
They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine. She must have
broken her rule against drinking that night for when she arrived she was
stupid with liquor and unable to understand that the ambulance had
already gone to Flushing. When they convinced her of this she
immediately fainted as if that was the intolerable part of the affair.
Someone kind or curious took her in his car and drove her in the wake of
her sister’s body.
Until long after midnight a changing crowd lapped up against the front
of the garage while George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on the
couch inside. For a while the door of the office was open and everyone
who came into the garage glanced irresistibly through it. Finally someone
said it was a shame and closed the door. Michaelis and several other men
were with him—first four or five men, later two or three men. Still later
Michaelis had to ask the last stranger to wait there fifteen minutes longer
while he went back to his own place and made a pot of coffee. After that
he stayed there alone with Wilson until dawn.
About three o’clock the quality of Wilson’s incoherent muttering
changed—he grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He
announced that he had a way of finding out whom the yellow car
belonged to, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his wife
had come from the city with her face bruised and her nose swollen.
But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry ‘Oh,
my God!’ again in his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attempt
to distract him.
‘How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit
still a minute and answer my question. How long have you been
married?’
‘Twelve years.’
‘Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still—I asked you a
question. Did you ever have any children?’
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The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light and
whenever Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it
sounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few hours before. He
didn’t like to go into the garage because the work bench was stained
where the body had been lying so he moved uncomfortably around the
office— he knew every object in it before morning—and from time to
time sat down beside Wilson trying to keep him more quiet.
‘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.’
The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking— for a
moment he was silent. Then the same half knowing, half bewildered look
came back into his faded eyes.
‘Look in the drawer there,’ he said, pointing at the desk.
‘Which drawer?’
‘That drawer—that one.’
Michaelis opened the drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it
but a small expensive dog leash made of leather and braided silver. It
was apparently new.
‘This?’ he inquired, holding it up.
Wilson stared and nodded.
‘I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it but I knew
it was something funny.’
‘You mean your wife bought it?’
‘She had it wrapped in tissue paper on her bureau.’
Michaelis didn’t see anything odd in that and he gave Wilson a dozen
reasons why his wife might have bought the dog leash. But conceivably
Wilson had heard some of these same explanations before, from Myrtle,
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because he began saying ‘Oh, my God!’ again in a whisper—his

comforter left several explanations in the air.
‘Then he killed her,’ said Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly.
‘Who did?’
‘I have a way of finding out.’
‘You’re morbid, George,’ said his friend. ‘This has been a strain to
you and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’d better try and sit
quiet till morning.’
‘He murdered her.’
‘It was an accident, George.’
Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened
slightly with the ghost of a superior ‘Hm!’
‘I know,’ he said definitely, ‘I’m one of these trusting fellas and I don’t
think any harm to nobody, but when I get to know a thing I know it. It
was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn’t
stop.’
Michaelis had seen this too but it hadn’t occurred to him that there was
any special significance in it. He believed that Mrs. Wilson had been
running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any particular
car.
‘How could she of been like that?’
‘She’s a deep one,’ said Wilson, as if that answered the question. ‘Ah-
h-h—’
He began to rock again and Michaelis stood twisting the leash in his
hand.
‘Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?’
This was a forlorn hope—he was almost sure that Wilson had no
friend: there was not enough of him for his wife. He was glad a little later
when he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window,
and realized that dawn wasn’t far off. About five o’clock it was blue
enough outside to snap off the light.

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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 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.
By six o’clock Michaelis was worn out and grateful for the sound of a
car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before who
had promised to come back so he cooked breakfast for three which he
and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now and Michaelis
went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and hurried back to
the garage Wilson was gone.
His movements—he was on foot all the time—were afterward traced
to Port Roosevelt and then to Gad’s Hill where he bought a sandwich
that he didn’t eat and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and
walking slowly for he didn’t reach Gad’s Hill until noon. Thus far there
was no difficulty in accounting for his time—there were boys who had
seen a man ‘acting sort of crazy’ and motorists at whom he stared oddly
from the side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared from view.
The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis, that he ‘had a
way of finding out,’ supposed that he spent that time going from garage
to garage thereabouts inquiring for a yellow car. On the other hand no
garage man who had seen him ever came forward—and perhaps he had
an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know. By half past

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two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to Gatsby’s
house. So by that time he knew Gatsby’s name.
At two o’clock Gatsby put on his bathing suit and left word with the
butler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at the pool.
He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused his
guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up.
Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn’t to be taken out under
any circumstances—and this was strange because the front right fender
needed repair.
Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once he
stopped and shifted it a little, and the chauffeur asked him if he needed
help, but he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among the
yellowing trees.
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.
The chauffeur—he was one of Wolfshiem’s protégés— heard the
shots—afterward he could only say that he hadn’t thought anything much
about them. I drove from the station directly to Gatsby’s house and my
rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed any
one. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a word said, four
of us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener and I, hurried down to the pool.
There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the
fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With
little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, 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
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its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly,

tracing, like the leg of compass, 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.

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Chapter 9
After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the
next day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers and
newspaper men in and out of Gatsby’s front door. A rope stretched across
the main gate and a policeman by it kept out the curious, but little boys
soon discovered that they could enter through my yard and there were
always a few of them clustered open-mouthed about the pool. Someone
with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the expression ‘mad
man’ as he bent over Wilson’s body that afternoon, and the adventitious
authority of his voice set the key for the newspaper reports next morning.
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.
But all this part of it seemed remote and unessential. I found myself
on Gatsby’s side, and alone. From the moment I telephoned news of the
catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, and every
practical question, was referred to me. At first I was surprised and
confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak
hour upon hour it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one
else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense personal
interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end.
I called up Daisy half an hour after we found him, called her
instinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone away
early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.

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‘Left no address?’
‘No.’
‘Say when they’d be back?’
‘No.’
‘Any idea where they are? How I could reach them?’
‘I don’t know. Can’t say.’
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—’
Meyer Wolfshiem’s name wasn’t in the phone book. The butler gave
me his office address on Broadway and I called Information, but by the
time I had the number it was long after five and no one answered the
phone.
‘Will you ring again?’
‘I’ve rung them three times.’
‘It’s very important.’
‘Sorry. I’m afraid no one’s there.’
I went back to the drawing-room and thought for an instant that they
were chance visitors, all these official people who suddenly filled it. But
as they drew back the sheet and looked at Gatsby with shocked eyes, his
protest continued in my brain.
‘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.’
Someone started to ask me questions but I broke away and going
upstairs looked hastily through the unlocked parts of his desk—he’d
never told me definitely that his parents were dead. But there was
nothing—only the picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence
staring down from the wall.
Next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfshiem
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 there’d be a wire from
Daisy before noon—but neither a wire nor Mr. Wolfshiem arrived, no
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one arrived except more police and photographers and newspaper men.
When the butler brought back Wolfshiem’s answer I began to have a
feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against
them all.
Dear Mr. Carraway. 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. Such a
mad act as that man did should make us all think. I cannot come
down now as I am tied up in some very important business and
cannot get mixed up in this thing now. If there is anything I can
do a little later let me know in a letter by Edgar. I hardly know
where I am when I hear about a thing like this and am completely
knocked down and out.
Yours truly
MEYER WOLFSHIEM
and then hasty addenda beneath:
Let me know about the funeral etc. do not know his family at all.
When the phone rang that afternoon and Long Distance said Chicago
was calling I thought this would be Daisy at last. But the connection came
through as a man’s voice, very thin and far away.
‘This is Slagle speaking....’
‘Yes?’ The name was unfamiliar.
‘Hell of a note, isn’t it? Get my wire?’
‘There haven’t been any wires.’
‘Young Parke’s in trouble,’ he said rapidly. ‘They picked him up when
he handed the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New York
giving ‘em the numbers just five minutes before. What d’you know about
that, hey? You never can tell in these hick towns——’
‘Hello!’ I interrupted breathlessly. ‘Look here—this isn’t Mr. Gatsby.
Mr. Gatsby’s dead.’
There was a long silence on the other end of the wire, followed by an
exclamation … then a quick squawk as the connection was broken.
*

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I think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz
arrived from a town in Minnesota. It said only that the sender was leaving
immediately and to postpone the funeral until he came.
It was Gatsby’s father, a solemn old man very helpless and dismayed,
bundled up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day. His
eyes leaked continuously with excitement and when I took the bag and
umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse grey
beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat. He was on the point of
collapse so I took him into the music room and made him sit down while
I sent for something to eat. But he wouldn’t eat and the glass of milk
spilled from his trembling hand.
‘I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,’ he said. ‘It was all in the Chicago
newspaper. I started right away.’
‘I didn’t know how to reach you.’
His eyes, seeing nothing, moved ceaselessly about the room.
‘It was a mad man,’ he said. ‘He must have been mad.’
‘Wouldn’t you like some coffee?’ I urged him.
‘I don’t want anything. I’m all right now, Mr.—’
‘Carraway.’
‘Well, I’m all right now. Where have they got Jimmy?’
I took him into the drawing-room, where his son lay, and left him
there. Some little boys had come up on the steps and were looking into
the hall; when I told them who had arrived they went reluctantly away.
After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth
ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual
tears. He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of
ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time
and saw the height and splendor of the hall and the great rooms opening
out from it into other rooms his grief began to be mixed with an awed
pride. I helped him to a bedroom upstairs; while he took off his coat and
vest I told him that all arrangements had been deferred until he came.
‘I didn’t know what you’d want, Mr. Gatsby—’
‘Gatz is my name.’
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‘—Mr. Gatz. I thought you might want to take the body west.’
He shook his head.
‘Jimmy always liked it better down East. He rose up to his position in
the East. Were you a friend of my boy’s, Mr.—?’
‘We were close friends.’
‘He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man
but he had a lot of brain power here.’
He touched his head impressively and I nodded.
‘If he’d of lived he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill.
He’d of helped build up the country.’
‘That’s true,’ I said, uncomfortably.
He fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to take it from the bed,
and lay down stiffly—was instantly asleep.
That night an obviously frightened person called up and demanded to
know who I was before he would give his name.
‘This is Mr. Carraway,’ I said.
‘Oh—’ He sounded relieved. ‘This is Klipspringer.’
I was relieved too for that seemed to promise another friend at
Gatsby’s grave. I didn’t want it to be in the papers and draw a sightseeing
crowd so I’d been calling up a few people myself. They were hard to
find.
‘The funeral’s tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Three o’clock, here at the house. I
wish you’d tell anybody who’d be interested.’
‘Oh, I will,’ he broke out hastily. ‘Of course I’m not likely to see
anybody, but if I do.’
His tone made me suspicious.
‘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

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tomorrow. 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.
After that I felt a certain shame for Gatsby—one gentleman to whom
I telephoned implied that he had got what he deserved. However, that
was my fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at
Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor and I should have known better
than to call him.
The morning of the funeral I went up to New York to see Meyer
Wolfshiem; I couldn’t seem to reach him any other way. The door that I
pushed open on the advice of an elevator boy was marked ‘The Swastika
Holding Company’ and at first there didn’t seem to be any one inside.
But when I’d shouted ‘Hello’ several times in vain an argument broke
out behind a partition and presently a lovely Jewess appeared at an
interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.
‘Nobody’s in,’ she said. ‘Mr. Wolfshiem’s gone to Chicago.’
The first part of this was obviously untrue for someone had begun to
whistle ‘The Rosary,’ tunelessly, inside.
‘Please say that Mr. Carraway wants to see him.’
‘I can’t get him back from Chicago, can I?’
At this moment a voice, unmistakably Wolfshiem’s called ‘Stella!’
from the other side of the door.
‘Leave your name on the desk,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ll give it to him
when he gets back.’
‘But I know he’s there.’
She took a step toward me and began to slide her hands indignantly up
and down her hips.
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‘You young men think you can force your way in here any time,’ she
scolded. ‘We’re getting sickantired of it. When I say he’s in Chicago,
he’s in Chicago.’
I mentioned Gatsby.
‘Oh—h!’ She looked at me over again. ‘Will you just—what was your
name?’
She vanished. In a moment Meyer Wolfshiem stood solemnly in the
doorway, holding out both hands. He drew me into his office, remarking
in a reverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered me a
cigar.
‘My memory goes back to when I first met him,’ he said. ‘A young
major just out of the army and covered over with medals he got in the
war. He was so hard up he had to keep on wearing his uniform because
he couldn’t buy some regular clothes. First time I saw him was when he
come into Winebrenner’s poolroom at Forty-third Street and asked for a
job. He hadn’t eat anything for a couple of days. ‘Come on have some
lunch with me,’ I sid. He ate more than four dollars’ worth of food in half
an hour.’
‘Did you start him in business?’ I inquired.
‘Start him! I made him.’
‘Oh.’
‘I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away
he was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told me
he was an Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join up in
the American Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off he did
some work for a client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick like that
in everything—’ He held up two bulbous fingers ‘—always together.’
I wondered if this partnership had included the World’s Series
transaction in 1919.
‘Now he’s dead,’ I said after a moment. ‘You were his closest friend,
so I know you’ll want to come to his funeral this afternoon.’
‘I’d like to come.’
‘Well, come then.’

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The hair in his nostrils quivered slightly and as he shook his head his
eyes filled with tears.
‘I can’t do it—I can’t get mixed up in it,’ he said.
‘There’s nothing to get mixed up in. It’s all over now.’
‘When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way.
I keep out. When I was a young man it was different—if a friend of mine
died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that’s
sentimental but I mean it—to the bitter end.’
I saw that for some reason of his own he was determined not to come,
so I stood up.
‘Are you a college man?’ he inquired suddenly.
For a moment I thought he was going to suggest a ‘gonnegtion’ but he
only nodded and shook my hand.
‘Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and
not after he is dead,’ he suggested. ‘After that my own rule is to let
everything alone.’
When I left his office the sky had turned dark and I got back to West
Egg in a drizzle. After changing my clothes I went next door and found
Mr. Gatz walking up and down excitedly in the hall. His pride in his son
and in his son’s possessions was continually increasing and now he had
something to show me.
‘Jimmy sent me this picture.’ He took out his wallet with trembling
fingers. ‘Look there.’
It was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dirty with
many hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. ‘Look there!’ and
then sought admiration from my eyes. He had shown it so often that I
think it was more real to him now than the house itself.
‘Jimmy sent it to me. I think it’s a very pretty picture. It shows up
well.’
‘Very well. Had you seen him lately?’
‘He come out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live
in now. Of course we was broke up when he run off from home but I see

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now there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of
him. And ever since he made a success he was very generous with me.’
He seemed reluctant to put away the picture, held it for another minute,
lingeringly, before my eyes. Then he returned the wallet and pulled from
his pocket a ragged old copy of a book called ‘Hopalong Cassidy.’
‘Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just shows
you.’
He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. 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 A.M.
Study electricity, etc … … … … … … …… 7.15-8.15 A.M.
Work … … … … … … … … …… … …… 8.30-4.30 P.M.
Baseball and sports … … … … … … … … 4.30-5.00 P.M.
Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00 P.M.
Study needed inventions … … … …… …… 7.00-9.00 P.M.

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
‘I come across this book by accident,’ said the old man. ‘It just shows
you, don’t it?’
‘It just shows you.’
‘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.’
He was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then
looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the
list for my own use.
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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.
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 marvelling 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.

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One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep

school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther
than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of
a December evening with a few Chicago friends already caught up into
their own holiday gayeties to bid them a hasty goodbye. 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 and 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. I see now that this has been a story of the
West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all
Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common
which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly
aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond
the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the
children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of
distortion. West Egg especially still figures in my more fantastic dreams.
I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once
conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky
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and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits
are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken
woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side,
sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong
house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.
After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted
beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle
leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line
I decided to come back home.
There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant
thing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted to leave
things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep
my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and talked over and around what
had happened to us together and what had happened afterward to me,
and she lay perfectly still listening in a big chair.
She was dressed to play golf and I remember thinking she looked like
a good illustration, her chin raised a little, jauntily, her hair the color of
an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on
her knee. When I had finished she told me without comment that she was
engaged to another man. I doubted that though there were several she
could have married at a nod of her head but I pretended to be surprised.
For just a minute I wondered if I wasn’t making a mistake, then I thought
it all over again quickly and got up to say goodbye.
‘Nevertheless you did throw me over,’ said Jordan suddenly. ‘You
threw me over on the telephone. I don’t give a damn about you now but
it was a new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while.’
We shook hands.
‘Oh, and do you remember—’ she added, ‘—a conversation we had
once about driving a car?’
‘Why—not exactly.’
‘You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver?
Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to
make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest,
straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.’

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‘I’m thirty,’ I said. ‘I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it
honor.’
She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously
sorry, I turned away.
One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking
ahead of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands
out a little from his body as if to fight off interference, his head moving
sharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes. Just as I slowed
up to avoid overtaking him he stopped and began frowning into the
windows of a jewelry store. Suddenly he saw me and walked back
holding out his hand.
‘What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?’
‘Yes. You know what I think of you.’
‘You’re crazy, Nick,’ he said quickly. ‘Crazy as hell. I don’t know
what’s the matter with you.’
‘Tom,’ I inquired, ‘what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?’
He stared at me without a word and I knew I had guessed right about
those missing hours. I started to turn away but he took a step after me
and grabbed my arm.
‘I told him the truth,’ he said. ‘He came to the door while we were
getting ready to leave and when I sent down word that we weren’t in he
tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn’t
told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket
every minute he was in the house—’ He broke off defiantly. ‘What if I
did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your
eyes just like he did in Daisy’s but he was a tough one. He ran over
Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.’
There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it
wasn’t true.
‘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——’

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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….
I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as
though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to
buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons—rid of my
provincial squeamishness forever.
Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had
grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never took
a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing
inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg
the night of the accident and perhaps he had made a story about it all his
own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when I got off the train.
I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming,
dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the
music and the laughter faint and incessant from his garden and the cars
going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there
and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably
it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and
didn’t know that the party was over.
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.
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
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pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a
transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the
presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he
neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history
with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of
Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of
Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream
must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did
not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast
obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on
under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year
recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we
will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past.

THE END

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