The 143 Most Important Quotes in The Great Gatsby, Analyzed

Need to solidify your Great Gatsby essay with some evidence from the text? Want a refresher on the novel's style and sound? Curious how to go from a piece of text to a close reading and an analysis? Then check out this article featuring key Great Gatsby quotes!

We've rounded up a collection of important quotes by and about the main characters, quotes on the novel's major themes and symbols, and quotes from each of The Great Gatsby's chapters. In turn, each of the Great Gatsby quotes is followed by some brief analysis and explanation of its significance.

Article Roadmap

1. Using the quotes
2. Character quotes
   • Jay Gatsby
   • Nick Carraway
   • Daisy Buchanan
   • Tom Buchanan
   • Jordan Baker
   • Myrtle Wilson
   • George Wilson
3. Theme quotes
   • Money and Materialism
   • The American Dream
   • Love and Relationships
4. Symbol quotes
   • The green light
   • The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckelburg
   • The valley of ashes
5. Chapter quotes

Using These Great Gatsby Quotes

All of these are obviously presented outside of the full context of their chapters (if you're hazy on the plot, be sure to check out our chapter summaries!). If you're going to use any of these quotes in an essay, you need to understand where each quote fits into the book, who's speaking, and why the line is important or significant. Or to put it more bluntly, don't just lift these for an essay without having read the book, or your essay won't be very strong!

We do some initial analysis here for each quote to get you thinking, but remember to close-read and bring your own interpretations and ideas to the text. It may be that you disagree with some of our analysis!

Quick Note on Our Citations

Our citation format in this guide is (chapter.paragraph). We're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book. To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of chapter; 50-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text.

We will cover the characters in the following order, and also provide links to their character pages where you can check out their physical descriptions, backgrounds, action in the book, and common discussion topics.

Great Gatsby Character Quotes

Click on each character's name to read a detailed analysis!

Jay Gatsby

Gatsby adopts this catchphrase, which was used among wealthy people in England and America at the time, to help build up his image as a man from old money, which is related to his frequent insistence he is "an Oxford man." Note that both Jordan Baker and Tom Buchanan are immediately skeptical of both Gatsby's "old sport" phrase and his claim of being an Oxford man, indicating that despite Gatsby's efforts, it is incredibly difficult to pass yourself off as "old money" when you aren't.

In this moment, Nick begins to believe and appreciate Gatsby, and not just see him as a puffed-up fraud. The medal, to Nick, is hard proof that Gatsby did, in fact, have a successful career as an officer during the war and therefore that some of Gatsby's other claims might be true.

For the reader, the medal serves as questionable evidence that Gatsby really is an "extraordinary" man—isn't it a bit strange that Gatsby has to produce physical evidence to get Nick to buy his story? (Imagine how strange it would be to carry around a physical token to show to strangers to prove your biggest achievement.)

In Chapter 5, the dream Gatsby has been working towards for years—to meet and impress Daisy with his fabulous wealth—finally begins to come to fruition. And so, for the first time, we see Gatsby's genuine emotions, rather than his carefully-constructed persona. Nick finds these emotions almost as beautiful and transformative as Gatsby's smile, though there's also the sense that this love could quickly veer off the rails: Gatsby is running down "like an overwound clock." In that sense, this moment gently foreshadows the escalating tensions that lead to the novel's tragic climax.

This is probably Gatsby's single most famous quote. His insistence that he can repeat the past and recreate everything as it was in Louisville sums up his intense determination to win Daisy back at any cost. It also shows his naiveté and optimism, even delusion, about what is possible in his life—an attitude which are increasingly at odds with the cynical portrait of the world painted by Nick Carraway.

This is the moment Gatsby lays his cards out on the table, so to speak—he risks everything to try and win over Daisy. His insistence that Daisy never loved Tom also reveals how Gatsby refuses to acknowledge Daisy could have changed or loved anyone else since they were together in Louisville.

This declaration, along with his earlier insistence that he can "repeat the past," creates an image of an overly optimistic, naïve person, despite his experiences in the war and as a bootlegger. Especially since Daisy can't support this statement, saying that she loved both Tom and Gatsby, and Tom quickly seizes power over the situation by practically ordering Gatsby and Daisy to drive home together, Gatsby's confident insistence that Daisy has only ever loved him feels desperate, even delusional.

One of the most famous ending lines in modern literature, this quote is Nick's final analysis of Gatsby—someone who believed in "the green light, the orgastic future" that he could never really attain. Our last image of Gatsby is of a man who believed in a world (and a future) that was better than the one he found himself in—but you can read more about interpretations of the ending, both optimistic and pessimistic, in our guide to the end of the book

Nick Carraway

The first lines establish Nick as thoughtful, thorough, privileged, and judgmental. This line also sets the tone for the first few pages, where Nick tells us about his background and tries to encourage the reader to trust his judgment. While he comes off as thoughtful and observant, we also get the sense he is judgmental and a bit snobby.

To see more analysis of why the novel begins how it does, and what Nick's father's advice means for him as a character and as a narrator, read our article on the beginning of The Great Gatsby.

Another quote from the first few pages of the novel, this line sets up the novel's big question: why does Nick become so close to Gatsby, given that Gatsby represents everything he hates? It also hints to the reader that Nick will come to care about Gatsby deeply while everyone else will earn his "unaffected scorn." While this doesn't give away the plot, it does help the reader be a bit suspicious of everyone but Gatsby going into the story.

This is likely the moment when you start to suspect Nick doesn't always tell the truth—if everyone "suspects" themselves of one of the cardinal virtues (the implication being they aren't actually virtuous), if Nick says he's honest, perhaps he's not? Furthermore, if someone has to claim that they are honest, that often suggests that they do things that aren't exactly trustworthy.

Nick's interactions with Jordan are some of the only places where we get a sense of any vulnerability or emotion from Nick. In particular, Nick seems quite attracted to Jordan and being with her makes a phrase "beat" in his ears with "heady excitement." If there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired, it would appear Nick is happy to be the pursuer at this particular moment.

This line, which comes after Myrtle's death and Tom, Daisy, and Jordan's cold reaction to it, establishes that Nick has firmly come down on Gatsby's side in the conflict between the Buchanans and Gatsby. It also shows Nick's disenchantment with the whole wealthy east coast crowd and also that, at this point, he is devoted to Gatsby and determined to protect his legacy. This hints to us that our once seemingly impartial narrator is now seeing Gatsby more generously than he sees others.

This is Nick's conclusion to his story, which can be read as cynical, hopeful, or realistic, depending on how you interpret it. You can read in detail about these lines in our article about the novel's ending.

Daisy Buchanan

This deeply pessimistic comment is from the first time we meet Daisy in Chapter 1. She has just finished telling Nick about how when she gave birth to her daughter, she woke up alone—Tom was "god knows where." She asks for the baby's sex and cries when she hears it's a girl. So beneath her charming surface we can see Daisy is somewhat despondent about her role in the world and unhappily married to Tom. That said, right after this comment Nick describes her "smirking," which suggests that despite her pessimism, she doesn't seem eager to change her current state of affairs.

In this flashback, narrated by Jordan, we learn all about Daisy's past and how she came to marry Tom, despite still being in love with Jay Gatsby. In fact, she seems to care about him enough that after receiving a letter from him, she threatens to call off her marriage to Tom. However, despite this brief rebellion, she is quickly put back together by Jordan and her maid—the dress and the pearls represent Daisy fitting back into her prescribed social role. And indeed, the next day she marries Tom "without so much as a shiver," showing her reluctance to question the place in society dictated by her family and social status.

During Daisy and Gatsby's reunion, she is delighted by Gatsby's mansion but falls to pieces after Gatsby giddily shows off his collection of shirts.

This scene is often confusing to students. Why does Daisy start crying at this particular display? The scene could speak to Daisy's materialism: that she only emotionally breaks down at this conspicuous proof of Gatsby's newfound wealth. But it also speaks to her strong feelings for Gatsby, and how touched she is at the lengths he went to to win her back.

In Chapter 7, as Daisy tries to work up the courage to tell Tom she wants to leave him, we get another instance of her struggling to find meaning and purpose in her life. Beneath Daisy's cheerful exterior, there is a deep sadness, even nihilism, in her outlook (compare this to Jordan's more optimistic response that life renews itself in autumn).

Gatsby explicitly ties Daisy and her magnetic voice to wealth. This particular line is really crucial, since it ties Gatsby's love for Daisy to his pursuit of wealth and status. It also allows Daisy herself to become a stand-in for the idea of the American Dream. We'll discuss even more about the implications of Daisy's voice below.

During the climactic confrontation in New York City, Daisy can't bring herself to admit she only loved Gatsby, because she did also love Tom at the beginning of their marriage. This moment is crushing for Gatsby, and some people who read the novel and end up disliking Daisy point to this moment as proof. "Why couldn't she get up the courage to just leave that awful Tom?" they ask.

However, I would argue that Daisy's problem isn't that she loves too little, but that she loves too much. She fell in love with Gatsby and was heartbroken when he went to war, and again when he reached out to her right before she was set to marry Tom. And then she fell deeply in love with Tom in the early days of their marriage, only to discover his cheating ways and become incredibly despondent (see her earlier comment about women being "beautiful little fools"). So by now she's been hurt by falling in love, twice, and is wary of risking another heartbreak.

Furthermore, we do see again her reluctance to part with her place in society. Being with Gatsby would mean giving up her status as old-money royalty and instead being the wife of a gangster. That's a huge jump for someone like Daisy, who was essentially raised to stay within her class. So it's hard to blame her for not giving up her entire life (not to mention her daughter!) to be with Jay.

Tom Buchanan

Tom is established early on as restless and bored, with the threat of physical aggression lurking behind that restlessness. With his glory days on the Yale football team well behind him, he seems to constantly be searching for—and failing to find—the excitement of a college football game. Perhaps Tom, like Gatsby, is also trying, and failing, to repeat the past in his own way.

In Chapter 1, we learn Tom has been reading "profound" books lately, including racist ones that claim the white race is superior to all others and has to maintain control over society. This speaks to Tom's insecurity—even as someone born into incredible money and privilege, there's a fear it could be taken away by social climbers. That insecurity only translates into even more overt shows of his power—flaunting his relationship with Myrtle, revealing Gatsby as a bootlegger, and manipulating George to kill Gatsby—thus completely freeing the Buchanans from any consequences from the murders.

Early in the book, Tom advises Nick not to believe rumors and gossip, but specifically what Daisy has been telling him about their marriage.

Nick certainly is wary of most people he meets, and, indeed, he sees through Daisy in Chapter 1 when he observes she has no intentions of leaving Tom despite her complaints: "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" (1.150). But as the book goes on, Nick drops some of his earlier skepticism as he comes to learn more about Gatsby and his life story, coming to admire him despite his status as a bootlegger and criminal.

This leaves us with an image of Tom as cynical and suspicious in comparison to the optimistic Gatsby—but perhaps also more clear-eyed than Nick is by the end of the novel.

After seeing Tom's liaisons with Myrtle and his generally boorish behavior, this claim to loving Daisy comes off as fake at best and manipulative at worst (especially since a spree is a euphemism for an affair!).

We also see Tom grossly underreporting his bad behavior (we have seen one of his "sprees" and it involved breaking Myrtle's nose after sleeping with her while Nick was in the next room) and either not realizing or ignoring how damaging his actions can be to others. He is explicit about his misbehavior and doesn't seem sorry at all—he feels like his "sprees" don't matter as long as he comes back to Daisy after they're over.

In short, this quote captures how the reader comes to understand Tom late in the novel—as a selfish rich man who breaks things and leaves others to clean up his mess.

Again, Tom's jealousy and anxiety about class are revealed. Though he immediately pegs Gatsby for a bootlegger rather than someone who inherited his money, Tom still makes a point of doing an investigation to figure out exactly where the money came from. This shows that he does feel a bit threatened by Gatsby, and wants to be sure he thoroughly knocks him down.

But at the same time, he's the only one in the room who sees Gatsby for who he actually is. This is also a moment where you, as a reader, can really see how clouded Nick's judgment of Gatsby has become.

A common question students have after reading Gatsby for the first time is this: why does Tom let Daisy and Gatsby ride back together? If he's so protective and jealous of Daisy, wouldn't he insist she come with him?

The answer is that he is demonstrating his power over both Daisy and Gatsby—he's no longer scared that Daisy will leave him for Gatsby, and he's basically rubbing that in Gatsby's face. He's saying that he doesn't even fear leaving them alone together, because he knows that nothing Gatsby says or does would convince Daisy to leave him. It's a subtle but crucial show of power—and of course ends up being a fatal choice.

One of Tom's last lines in the novel, he coldly tells Nick that Gatsby was fooling both him and Daisy. Of course, since we know that Gatsby didn't actually run over Daisy, we can read this line in one of three ways:

• Maybe Daisy never actually admitted to Tom that she was the one driving the car that night, so he still has no idea that his wife killed his mistress.

• Or maybe the way Tom has made peace with what happened is by convincing himself that even if Daisy was technically driving, Gatsby is to blame for Myrtle's death anyway.

• Or maybe Tom is still scared of speaking the truth about Daisy's involvement to anyone, including Nick, on the off chance that the police will reopen the case with new evidence.

Jordan Baker

This is an early example of Jordan's unexpectedly clever observations—throughout the novel she reveals a quick wit and keen eye for detail in social situations. This comment also sets the stage for the novel's chief affair between Daisy and Gatsby, and how at the small party in Chapter 7 their secrets come out to disastrous effect.

Compare Jordan's comment to Daisy's general attitude of being too sucked into her own life to notice what's going on around her.

Here we get a sense of what draws Jordan and Nick together—he's attracted to her carefree, entitled attitude while she sees his cautiousness as a plus. After all, if it really does take two to make an accident, as long as she's with a careful person, Jordan can do whatever she wants!

We also see Jordan as someone who carefully calculates risks—both in driving and in relationships. This is why she brings up her car accident analogy again at the end of the book when she and Nick break up—Nick was, in fact, a "bad driver" as well, and she was surprised that she read him wrong.

Another example of Jordan's observant wit, this quote (about Daisy) is Jordan's way of suggesting that perhaps Daisy's reputation is not so squeaky-clean as everyone else believes. After all, if Daisy were the only sober one in a crowd of partiers, it would be easy for her to hide less-than-flattering aspects about herself.

In this moment, Nick reveals what he finds attractive about Jordan—not just her appearance (though again, he describes her as pleasingly "jaunty" and "hard" here), but her attitude. She's skeptical without being fully cynical, and remains upbeat and witty despite her slightly pessimistic outlook. At this point in the story, Midwestern Nick probably still finds this exciting and attractive, though of course by the end he realizes that her attitude makes it hard for her to truly empathize with others, like Myrtle.

In contrast to Daisy (who says just before this, rather despairingly, "What will we do today, and then tomorrow, and for the next thirty years?" (7.74)), Jordan is open to and excited about the possibilities still available to her in her life. As we'll discuss later, perhaps since she's still unmarried her life still has a freedom Daisy's does not, and the possibility to start over.

While she's not exactly a starry-eyed optimist, she does show a resilience, and an ability to start things over and move on, that allows her to escape the tragedy at the end relatively unscathed. It also fits how Jordan doesn't seem to let herself get too attached to people or places, which is why she's surprised by how much she felt for Nick.

Jordan doesn't frequently showcase her emotions or show much vulnerability, so this moment is striking because we see that she did really care for Nick to at least some extent.Notice that she couches her confession with a pretty sassy remark ("I don't give a damn about you now") which feels hollow when you realize that being "thrown over" by Nick made her feel dizzy—sad, surprised, shaken—for a while.

Myrtle Wilson

Here, we see Myrtle transformed from her more sensuous, physical persona into that of someone desperate to come off as richer than she actually is. Wielding power over her group of friends, she seems to revel in her own image.

Unlike Gatsby, who projects an elaborately rich and worldly character, Myrtle's persona is much more simplistic and transparent. (Notably Tom, who immediately sees Gatsby as a fake, doesn't seem to mind Myrtle's pretensions—perhaps because they are of no consequence to him, or any kind of a threat to his lifestyle.)

Here we see Myrtle pushing her limits with Tom—and realizing that he is both violent and completely unwilling to be honest about his marriage.

While both characters are willful, impulsive, and driven by their desires, Tom is violently asserting here that his needs are more important than Myrtle's. After all, to Tom, Myrtle is just another mistress, and just as disposable as all the rest.

Also, this injury foreshadows Myrtle's death at the hands of Daisy, herself. While invoking Daisy's name here causes Tom to hurt Myrtle, Myrtle's actual encounter with Daisy later in the novel turns out to be deadly.

When George confronts his wife about her affair, Myrtle is furious and needles at her husband—already insecure since he's been cheated on—by insinuating he's weak and less of a man than Tom. Also, their fight centers around her body and its treatment, while Tom and Daisy fought earlier in the same chapter about their feelings.

In this moment, we see that despite how dangerous and damaging Myrtle's relationship with Tom is, she seems to be asking George to treat her in the same way that Tom has been doing. Myrtle's disturbing acceptance of her role as a just a body—a piece of meat, basically—foreshadows the gruesome physicality of her death.

Even in death, Myrtle's physicality and vitality are emphasized. In fact, the image is pretty overtly sexual—notice how it's Myrtle's breast that's torn open and swinging loose, and her mouth ripped open at the corners. This echoes Nick's view of Myrtle as a woman and mistress, nothing more—even in death she's objectified.

This moment is also much more violent than her earlier broken nose. While that moment cemented Tom as abusive in the eyes of the reader, this one truly shows the damage that Tom and Daisy leave in their wake, and shapes the tragic tone of the rest of the novel.

George Wilson

After our first introduction to George, Nick emphasizes George's meekness and deference to his wife, very bluntly commenting he is not his own man. Although this comment reveals a bit of Nick's misogyny—his comment seems to think George being his "wife's man" as opposed to his own is his primary source of weakness—it also continues to underscore George's devotion to Myrtle.

George's apparent weakness may make him an unlikely choice for Gatsby's murderer, until you consider how much pent-up anxiety and anger he has about Myrtle, which culminates in his two final, violent acts: Gatsby's murder and his own suicide.

His description also continues to ground him in the Valley of Ashes. Unlike all the other main characters, who move freely between Long Island and Manhattan (or, in Myrtle's case, between Queens and Manhattan), George stays in Queens, contributing to his stuck, passive, image. This makes his final journey, on foot, to Long Island, feel especially eerie and desperate.

George is completely devastated by the death of his wife, to the point of being inconsolable and unaware of reality. Although we hear he treated her roughly just before this, locking her up and insisting on moving her away from the city, he is completely devastated by her loss. This sharp break with his earlier passive persona prefigures his turn to violence at the end of the book.

George is looking for comfort, salvation, and order where there is nothing but an advertisement. This speaks to the moral decay of New York City, the East Coast, and even America in general during the 1920s. It also speaks to how alone and powerless George is, and how violence becomes his only recourse to seek revenge.

In this moment, the reader is forced to wonder if there is any kind of morality the characters adhere to, or if the world really is cruel and utterly without justice—and with no God except the empty eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg.

Key Great Gatsby Theme Quotes

Click on the title of each theme for an article explaining how it fits into the novel, which character it's connected to, and how to write an essay about it.

Money and Materialism

The epigraph of the novel immediately marks money and materialism as a key theme of the book—the listener is implored to "wear the gold hat" as a way to impress his lover. In other words, wealth is presented as the key to love—such an important key that the word "gold" is repeated twice. It's not enough to "bounce high" for someone, to win them over with your charm. You need wealth, the more the better, to win over the object of your desire.

Our introduction to Tom and Daisy immediately describes them as rich, bored, and privileged. Tom's restlessness is likely one motivator for his affairs, while Daisy is weighed down by the knowledge of those affairs. This combination of restlessness and resentment puts them on the path to the tragedy at the end of the book.

The description of Gatsby's parties at the beginning of Chapter 3 is long and incredibly detailed, and thus highlights the extraordinary extent of Gatsby's wealth and materialism. In contrast to Tom and Daisy's expensive but not overly gaudy mansion, and the small dinner party Nick attends there in Chapter 1, everything about Gatsby's new wealth is over-the-top and showy, from the crates of oranges brought in and juiced one-by-one by a butler, the "corps" of caterers to the full orchestra. Everyone who comes to the parties is attracted by Gatsby's money and wealth, making the culture of money-worship a society-wide trend in the novel, not just something our main characters fall victim to. After all, "People were not invited—they went there" (3.7). No one comes due to close personal friendship with Jay. Everyone is there for the spectacle alone.

Gatsby, like a peacock showing off its many-colored tail, flaunts his wealth to Daisy by showing off his many-colored shirts. And, fascinatingly, this is the first moment of the day Daisy fully breaks down emotionally—not when she first sees Gatsby, not after their first long conversation, not even at the initial sight of the mansion—but at this extremely conspicuous display of wealth. This speaks to her materialism and how, in her world, a certain amount of wealth is a barrier to entry for a relationship (friendship or more).

Daisy herself is explicitly connected with money here, which allows the reader to see Gatsby's desire for her as desire for wealth, money, and status more generally. So while Daisy is materialistic and is drawn to Gatsby again due to his newly-acquired wealth, we see Gatsby is drawn to her as well due to the money and status she represents.

Here, in the aftermath of the novel's carnage, Nick observes that while Myrtle, George, and Gatsby have all died, Tom and Daisy are not punished at all for their recklessness, they can simply retreat "back into their money or their vast carelessness… and let other people clean up the mess." So money here is more than just status—it's a shield against responsibility, which allows Tom and Daisy to behave recklessly while other characters suffer and die in pursuit of their dreams.

The American Dream

In our first glimpse of Jay Gatsby, we see him reaching towards something far off, something in sight but definitely out of reach. This famous image of the green light is often understood as part of The Great Gatsby's meditation on The American Dream—the idea that people are always reaching towards something greater than themselves that is just out of reach. You can read more about this in our post all about the green light. The fact that this yearning image is our introduction to Gatsby foreshadows his unhappy end and also marks him as a dreamer, rather than people like Tom or Daisy who were born with money and don't need to strive for anything so far off.

Early in the novel, we get this mostly optimistic illustration of the American Dream—we see people of different races and nationalities racing towards NYC, a city of unfathomable possibility. This moment has all the classic elements of the American Dream—economic possibility, racial and religious diversity, a carefree attitude. At this moment, it does feel like "anything can happen," even a happy ending.

However, this rosy view eventually gets undermined by the tragic events later in the novel. And even at this point, Nick's condescension towards the people in the other cars reinforces America's racial hierarchy that disrupts the idea of the American Dream. There is even a little competition at play, a "haughty rivalry" at play between Gatsby's car and the one bearing the "modish Negroes." Nick "laughs aloud" at this moment, suggesting he thinks it's amusing that the passengers in this other car see them as equals, or even rivals to be bested. In other words, he seems to firmly believe in the racial hierarchy Tom defends in Chapter 1, even if it doesn't admit it honestly.

This moment explicitly ties Daisy to all of Gatsby's larger dreams for a better life—to his American Dream. This sets the stage for the novel's tragic ending, since Daisy cannot hold up under the weight of the dream Gatsby projects onto her. Instead, she stays with Tom Buchanan, despite her feelings for Gatsby. Thus when Gatsby fails to win over Daisy, he also fails to achieve his version of the American Dream. This is why so many people read the novel as a somber or pessimistic take on the American Dream, rather than an optimistic one.

The closing pages of the novel reflect at length on the American Dream, in an attitude that seems simultaneously mournful, appreciative, and pessimistic. It also ties back to our first glimpse of Gatsby, reaching out over the water towards the Buchanan's green light. Nick notes that Gatsby's dream was "already behind him" then, in other words, it was impossible to attain. But still, he finds something to admire in how Gatsby still hoped for a better life, and constantly reached out toward that brighter future.

For a full consideration of these last lines and what they could mean, see our analysis of the novel's ending.

Love and Relationships

Daisy and Tom Marriage Quotes

Nick introduces Tom and Daisy as restless, rich, and as a singular unit: they. Despite all of the revelations about the affairs and other unhappiness in their marriage, and the events of the novel,it's important to note our first and last descriptions of Tom and Daisy describe them as a close, if bored, couple. In fact, Nick only doubles down on this observation later in Chapter 1.

In this passage, Daisy pulls Nick aside in Chapter 1 and claims, despite her outward happiness and luxurious lifestyle, she's quite depressed by her current situation. At first, it seems Daisy is revealing the cracks in her marriage—Tom was "God knows here" at the birth of their daughter, Pammy—as well as a general malaise about society in general ("everything's terrible anyhow").

However, right after this confession, Nick doubts her sincerity. And indeed, she follows up her apparently serious complaint with "an absolute smirk." What's going on here?

Well, Nick goes on to observe that the smirk "asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged." In other words, despite Daisy's performance, she seems content to remain with Tom, part of the "secret society" of the ultra-rich.

So the question is: can anyone—or anything—lift Daisy out of her complacency?

Over the course of the novel, both Tom and Daisy enter or continue affairs, pulling away from each other instead of confronting the problems in their marriage.

However, Gatsby forces them to confront their feelings in the Plaza Hotel when he demands Daisy say she never loved Tom. Although she gets the words out, she immediately rescinds them—"I did love [Tom] once but I loved you too!"—after Tom questions her.

Here, Tom—usually presented as a swaggering, brutish, and unkind—breaks down, speaking with "husky tenderness" and recalling some of the few happy moments in his and Daisy's marriage. This is a key moment because it shows despite the dysfunction of their marriage, Tom and Daisy seem to both seek solace in happy early memories. Between those few happy memories and the fact that they both come from the same social class, their marriage ends up weathering multiple affairs.

By the end of the novel, after Daisy's murder of Myrtle as well as Gatsby's death, she and Tom are firmly back together, "conspiring" and "careless" once again, despite the deaths of their lovers.

As Nick notes, they "weren't happy…and yet they weren't unhappy either." Their marriage is important to both of them, since it reassures their status as old money aristocracy and brings stability to their lives. So the novel ends with them once again described as a unit, a "they," perhaps even more strongly bonded since they've survived not only another round of affairs but murder, as well.

Myrtle and George Marriage Quotes

As we discuss in our article on the symbolic valley of ashes, George is coated by the dust of despair and thus seems mired in the hopelessness and depression of that bleak place, while Myrtle is alluring and full of vitality. Her first action is to order her husband to get chairs, and the second is to move away from him, closer to Tom.

In contrast to Tom and Daisy, who are initially presented as a unit, our first introduction to George and Myrtle shows them fractured, with vastly different personalities and motivations. We get the sense right away that their marriage is in trouble, and conflict between the two is imminent.

Here we get a bit of back-story about George and Myrtle's marriage: like Daisy, Myrtle was crazy about her husband at first but the marriage has since soured. But while Daisy doesn't have any real desire to leave Tom, here we see Myrtle eager to leave, and very dismissive of her husband. Myrtle seems to suggest that even having her husband wait on her is unacceptable—it's clear she thinks she is finally headed for bigger and better things.

Again, in contrast to the strangely unshakeable partnership of Tom and Daisy, the co-conspirators, Michaelis (briefly taking over narrator duties) observes that George "was his wife's man," "worn out." Obviously, this situation gets turned on its head when George locks Myrtle up when he discovers the affair, but Michaelis's observation speaks to instability in the Wilson's marriage, in which each fights for control over the other. Rather than face the world as a unified front, the Wilsons each struggle for dominance within the marriage.

We don't know what happened in the fight before this crucial moment, but we do know George locked Myrtle in a room once he figured out she was having an affair. So despite the outward appearance of being ruled by his wife, he does, in fact, have the ability to physically control her. However, he apparently doesn't hit her, the way Tom does, and Myrtle taunts him for it—perhaps insinuating he's less a man than Tom.

This outbreak of both physical violence (George locking up Myrtle) and emotional abuse (probably on both sides) fulfills the earlier sense of the marriage being headed for conflict.Still, it's disturbing to witness the last few minutes of this fractured, unstable partnership.

Daisy and Gatsby Relationship Quotes

In the first chapter, we get a few mentions and glimpses of Gatsby, but one of the most interesting is Daisy immediately perking up at his name. She obviously still remembers him and perhaps even thinks about him, but her surprise suggests that she thinks he's long gone, buried deep in her past.

This is in sharp contrast to the image we get of Gatsby himself at the end of the Chapter, reaching actively across the bay to Daisy's house (1.152). While Daisy views Gatsby as a memory, Daisy is Gatsby's past, present, and future. It's clear even in Chapter 1 that Gatsby's love for Daisy is much more intense than her love for him.

In Chapter 4, we learn Daisy and Gatsby's story from Jordan: specifically, how they dated in Louisville but it ended when Gatsby went to the front. She also explains how Daisy threatened to call off her marriage to Tom after receiving a letter from Gatsby, but of course ended up marrying him anyway (4.140).

Here we also learn that Gatsby's primary motivation is to get Daisy back, while Daisy is of course in the dark about all of this. This sets the stage for their affair being on unequal footing: while each has love and affection for the other, Gatsby has thought of little else but Daisy for five years while Daisy has created a whole other life for herself.

Daisy and Gatsby finally reunite in Chapter 5, the book's mid-point. The entire chapter is obviously important for understanding the Daisy/Gatsby relationship, since we actually see them interact for the first time. But this initial dialogue is fascinating, because we see that Daisy's memories of Gatsby are more abstract and clouded, while Gatsby has been so obsessed with her he knows the exact month they parted and has clearly been counting down the days until their reunion.

After the initially awkward re-introduction, Nick leaves Daisy and Gatsby alone and comes back to find them talking candidly and emotionally. Gatsby has transformed—he is radiant and glowing. In contrast, we don't see Daisy as radically transformed except for her tears. Although our narrator, Nick, pays much closer attention to Gatsby than Daisy, these different reactions suggest Gatsby is much more intensely invested in the relationship.

Gatsby gets the chance to show off his mansion and enormous wealthy to Daisy, and she breaks down after a very conspicuous display of Gatsby's wealth, through his many-colored shirts.

In Daisy's tears, you might sense a bit of guilt—that Gatsby attained so much just for her—or perhaps regret, that she might have been able to be with him had she had the strength to walk away from her marriage with Tom.

Still, unlike Gatsby, whose motivations are laid bare, it's hard to know what Daisy is thinking and how invested she is in their relationship, despite how openly emotional she is during this reunion. Perhaps she's just overcome with emotion due to reliving the emotions of their first encounters.

In flashback, we hear about Daisy and Gatsby's first kiss, through Gatsby's point of view. We see explicitly in this scene that, for Gatsby, Daisy has come to represent all of his larger hopes and dreams about wealth and a better life—she is literally the incarnation of his dreams. There is no analogous passage on Daisy's behalf, because we actually don't know that much of Daisy's inner life, or certainly not much compared to Gatsby.

So we see, again, the relationship is very uneven—Gatsby has literally poured his heart and soul into it, while Daisy, though she obviously has love and affection for Gatsby, hasn't idolized him in the same way. It becomes clear here that Daisy—who is human and fallible—can never live up to Gatsby's huge projection of her.

Here we finally get a glimpse at Daisy's real feelings—she loved Gatsby, but also Tom, and to her those were equal loves. She hasn't put that initial love with Gatsby on a pedestal the way Gatsby has. Gatsby's obsession with her appears shockingly one-sided at this point, and it's clear to the reader she will not leave Tom for him. You can also see why this confession is such a blow to Gatsby: he's been dreaming about Daisy for years and sees her as his one true love, while she can't even rank her love for Gatsby above her love for Tom.

Despite Daisy's rejection of Gatsby back at the Plaza Hotel, he refuses to believe that it was real and is sure that he can still get her back. His devotion is so intense he doesn't think twice about covering for her and taking the blame for Myrtle's death. In fact, his obsession is so strong he barely seems to register that there's been a death, or to feel any guilt at all. This moment further underscores how much Daisy means to Gatsby, and how comparatively little he means to her.

In Chapter 8, when we get the rest of Gatsby's backstory, we learn more about what drew him to Daisy—her wealth, and specifically the world that opened up to Gatsby as he got to know her. Interestingly, we also learn that her "value increased" in Gatsby's eyes when it became clear that many other men had also loved her. We see then how Daisy got all tied up in Gatsby's ambitions for a better, wealthier life.

You also know, as a reader, that Daisy obviously is human and fallible and can never realistically live up to Gatsby's inflated images of her and what she represents to him. So in these last pages, before Gatsby's death as we learn the rest of Gatsby's story, we sense that his obsessive longing for Daisy was as much about his longing for another, better life, than it was about a single woman.

Tom and Myrtle Relationship Quotes

This passage is great because it neatly displays Tom and Myrtle's different attitudes toward the affair. Myrtle thinks that Tom is spoiling her specifically, and that he cares about her more than he really does—after all, he stops to by her a dog just because she says it's cute and insists she wants one on a whim.

But to Tom, the money isn't a big deal. He casually throws away the 10 dollars, aware he's being scammed but not caring, since he has so much money at his disposal. He also insists that he knows more than the dog seller and Myrtle, showing how he looks down at people below his own class—but Myrtle misses this because she's infatuated with both the new puppy and Tom himself.

Myrtle, twelve years into a marriage she's unhappy in, sees her affair with Tom as a romantic escape. She tells the story of how she and Tom met like it's the beginning of a love story. In reality, it's pretty creepy—Tom sees a woman he finds attractive on a train and immediately goes and presses up to her like and convinces her to go sleep with him immediately. Not exactly the stuff of classic romance!

Combined with the fact Myrtle believes Daisy's Catholicism (a lie) is what keeps her and Tom apart, you see that despite Myrtle's pretensions of worldliness, she actually knows very little about Tom or the upper classes, and is a poor judge of character. She is an easy person for Tom to take advantage of.

In case the reader was still wondering that perhaps Myrtle's take on the relationship had some basis in truth, this is a cold hard dose of reality. Tom's vicious treatment of Myrtle reminds the reader of his brutality and the fact that, to him, Myrtle is just another affair, and he would never in a million years leave Daisy for her.

Despite the violence of this scene, the affair continues. Myrtle is either so desperate to escape her marriage or so self-deluded about what Tom thinks of her (or both) that she stays with Tom after this ugly scene.

Chapter 2 gives us lots of insight into Myrtle's character and how she sees her affair with Tom. But other than Tom's physical attraction to Myrtle, we don't get as clear of a view of his motivations until later on. In Chapter 7, Tom panics once he finds out George knows about his wife's affair. We learn here that control is incredibly important to Tom—control of his wife, control of his mistress, and control of society more generally (see his rant in Chapter 1 about the "Rise of the Colored Empires").

So just as he passionately rants and raves against the "colored races," he also gets panicked and angry when he sees that he is losing control both over Myrtle and Daisy. This speaks to Tom's entitlement—both as a wealthy person, as a man, and as a white person—and shows how his relationship with Myrtle is just another display of power. It has very little to do with his feelings for Myrtle herself. So as the relationship begins to slip from his fingers, he panics—not because he's scared of losing Myrtle, but because he's scared of losing a possession.

Despite Tom's abhorrent behavior throughout the novel, at the very end, Nick leaves us with an image of Tom confessing to crying over Myrtle. This complicates the reader's desire to see Tom as a straightforward villain. This confession of emotion certainly doesn't redeem Tom, but it does prevent you from seeing him as a complete monster.

Nick and Jordan Relationship Quotes

As Nick eyes Jordan in Chapter 1, we see his immediate physical attraction to her, though it's not as potent as Tom's to Myrtle. And similarly to Gatsby's attraction to Daisy being to her money and voice, Nick is pulled in by Jordan's posture, her "wan, charming discontented face"—her attitude and status are more alluring than her looks alone. So Nick's attraction to Jordan gives us a bit of insight both in how Tom sees Myrtle and how Gatsby sees Daisy.

Throughout the novel, we see Nick avoiding getting caught up in relationships—the woman he mentions back home, the woman he dates briefly in his office, Myrtle's sister—though he doesn't protest to being "flung together" with Jordan. Perhaps this is because Jordan would be a step up for Nick in terms of money and class, which speaks to Nick's ambition and class-consciousness, despite the way he paints himself as an everyman. Furthermore, unlike these other women, Jordan isn't clingy—she lets Nick come to her. Nick sees attracted to how detached and cool she is.

Here, Nick is attracted to Jordan's blasé attitude and her confidence that others will avoid her careless behavior—an attitude she can afford because of her money. In other words, Nick seems fascinated by the world of the super-wealthy and the privilege it grants its members.

So just as Gatsby falls in love with Daisy and her wealthy status, Nick also seems attracted to Jordan for similar reasons. However, this conversation not only foreshadows the tragic car accident later in the novel, but it also hints at what Nick will come to find repulsive about Jordan: her callous disregard for everyone but herself.

Nick, again with Jordan, seems exhilarated to be with someone who is a step above him in terms of social class, exhilarated to be a "pursuing" person, rather than just busy or tired. Seeing the usually level-headed Nick this enthralled gives us some insight into Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy, and also allows us to glimpse Nick-the-person, rather than Nick-the-narrator.

And again, we get a sense of what attracts him to Jordan—her clean, hard, limited self, her skepticism, and jaunty attitude. It's interesting to see these qualities become repulsive to Nick just a few chapters later.

Later in the novel, after Myrtle's tragic death, Jordan's casual, devil-may-care attitude is no longer cute—in fact, Nick finds it disgusting. How can Jordan care so little about the fact that someone died, and instead be most concerned with Nick acting cold and distant right after the accident?

In this brief phone conversation, we thus see Nick's infatuation with Jordan ending, replaced with the realization that Jordan's casual attitude is indicative of everything Nick hates about the rich, old money group. So by extension, Nick's relationship with Jordan represents how his feelings about the wealthy have evolved—at first he was drawn in by their cool, detached attitudes, but eventually found himself repulsed by their carelessness and cruelty.

In their official break-up, Jordan calls out Nick for claiming to be honest and straightforward but in fact being prone to lying himself. So even as Nick is disappointed in Jordan's behavior, Jordan is disappointed to find just another "bad driver" in Nick, and both seem to mutually agree they would never work as a couple. It's interesting to see Nick called out for dishonest behavior for once. For all of his judging of others, he's clearly not a paragon of virtue, and Jordan clearly recognizes that.

This break-up is also interesting because it's the only time we see a relationship end because the two members choose to walk away from each other—all the other failed relationships (Daisy/Gatsby, Tom/Myrtle, Myrtle/George) ended because one or both members died. So perhaps there is a safe way out of a bad relationship in Gatsby—to walk away early, even if it's difficult and you're still "half in love" with the other person (9.136).

If only Gatsby could have realized the same thing.

Key Great Gatsby Symbol Quotes

Click on each symbol to see how it relates to the novel's characters and themes and to get ideas for essay topics!

The Green Light

One thing in particular is interesting about the introduction of the green light: it's very mysterious. Nick seems not to be quite sure where the light is, or what its function might be:

• Although physically bounded by the width of the bay, the light is described as impossibly small ("minute" means "tiny enough to be almost insignificant") and confusingly distant.

• Even though we find out later that the light never turns off, here Nick only seems to be able to see the light when Gatsby is reaching out towards it. As soon as Gatsby disappears, Nick is in "darkness."

• This vagueness and mystery is a good way for the novel to underscore the fact that this light is a symbol—it stands not just for the physical object that it describes, but for an idea within the book. What's the idea? I'll talk all about it in the next section of this article.

This appearance of the green light is just as vitally important as the first one, mostly because the way the light is presented now is totally different than when we first saw it. Instead of the "enchanted" magical object we first saw, now the light has had its "colossal significance," or its symbolic meaning, removed from it. This is because Gatsby is now actually standing there and touching Daisy herself, so he no longer needs to stretch his arms out towards the light or worry that it's shrouded in mist.

However, this separation of the green light from its symbolic meaning is somehow sad and troubling. Gatsby seemingly ignores Daisy putting her arm through his because he is "absorbed" in the thought that the green light is now just a regular thing. Nick's observation that Gatsby's "enchanted objects" are down one sounds like a lament—how many enchanted objects are there in anyone's life?

Now the light has totally ceased being an observable object. Nick is not in Long Island any more, Gatsby is dead, Daisy is gone for good, and the only way the green light exists is in Nick's memories and philosophical observations. This means that the light is now just a symbol and nothing else.

But it is not the same deeply personal symbol it was in the first chapter. Check out the way Nick transitions from describing the green light as something "Gatsby believed in" to using it as something that motivates "us." Gatsby is no longer the only one reaching for this symbol—we all, universally, "stretch out our arms" toward it, hoping to reach it tomorrow or the next day.

You can read more in-depth analysis of the end of the novel in our article on the last paragraphs and last line of the novel.

The Eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckelburg

Just like the quasi-mysterious and unreal-sounding green light in Chapter 1, the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg are presented in a confusing and seemingly surreal way:

• Instead of simply saying that there is a giant billboard, Nick first spends several sentences describing seemingly living giant eyes that are hovering in mid-air.

• Unlike the very gray, drab, and monochrome surroundings, the eyes are blue and yellow. In a novel that is methodically color-coded, this brightness is a little surreal and connects the eyes to other blue and yellow objects.

• Moreover, the description has elements of horror. The "gigantic" eyes are disembodied, with "no face" and a "nonexistent nose."

• Adding to this creepy feel is the fact that even after we learn that the eyes are actually part of an advertisement, they are given agency and emotions. They don't simply exist in space, but "look out" and "persistently stare," the miserable landscape causes them to "brood," and they are even able to "exchange a frown" with Tom despite the fact that they have no mouth.

It's clear from this personification of an inanimate object that these eyes stand for something else—a huge, displeased watcher.

This time, the eyes are a warning to Nick that something is wrong. He thinks the problem is that the car is low on gas, but as we learn, the real problem at the garage is that George Wilson has found out that Myrtle is having an affair.

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

The word "vigil" is important here. It refers to staying awake for a religious purpose, or to keep watch over a stressful and significant time. Here, though, both of those meanings don't quite apply, and the word is used sarcastically.

The billboard eyes can't interact with the characters, but they do point to—or stand in for—a potential higher authority whose "brooding" and "caution" could also be accompanied by judgment. Their useless vigil is echoed by Myrtle's mistaken one—she is vigilant enough to spot Tom driving, but she is wrong to put her trust in him. Later, this trust in Tom and the yellow car is what gets her killed.

Here, finally, the true meaning of the odd billboard that everyone finds so disquieting is revealed.

To the unhinged George Wilson, first totally distraught over Myrtle's affair and then driven past his breaking point by her death, the billboard's eyes are a watchful God. Wilson doesn't go to church, and thus doesn't have access to the moral instruction that will help him control his darker impulses. Still, it seems that Wilson wants God, or at least a God-like influence, in his life—based on him trying to convert the watching eyes of the billboard into a God that will make Myrtle feel bad about "everything [she's] been doing."

In the way George stares "into the twilight" by himself, there is an echo of what we've often seen Gatsby doing—staring at the green light on Daisy's dock. Both men want something unreachable, and both imbue ordinary objects with overwhelming amounts of meaning.

So in the same way Myrtle couldn't see the truth above, this lack of a larger moral compass here guides George (or at least leave him vulnerable) to committing the murder/suicide. Even when characters reach out for a guiding truth in their lives, not only are they denied one, but they are also led instead toward tragedy.

The Valley of Ashes

After telling us about the "fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air" (1.12) ofWest Egg in Chapter 1, Nick shows us just how the glittering wealth of the nouveau riche who live there is accumulated. Much of it comes from industry: factories that pollute the area around them into a "grotesque" and "ghastly" version of a beautiful countryside.

Instead of the bucolic, green image of a regular farm, here we have a "fantastic farm" (fantastic here means "something out of the realm of fantasy") that grows ash instead of wheat and where pollution makes the water "foul" and the air "powdery."

This imagery of growth serves two purposes.

• First, it's disturbing, as it's clearly meant to be. The beauty of the natural world has been transformed into a horrible hellscape of gray ashes. Not only that, but it is turning regular humans into "ash-grey men" who "swarm" like insects around the factories and cargo trains (that's the "line of grey cars"). These are the people who do not get to enjoy either the luxury of life out on Long Island, or the faster-paced anonymous fun that Nick finds himself enjoying in Manhattan. In the novel's world of haves and have-nots, these are the have-nots.

• Second, the passage shows how disconnected the rich are from the source of their wealth. Nick is annoyed when he is a train passenger who has to wait for the drawbridge to lead barges through. But the barges are carrying the building products of the factories. Nick is a bond trader, and bonds are basically loans people give to companies (companies sell bond shares, use that money to grow, and then have to pay back that money to the people who bought the bonds). In the 1920s, the bond market was fueling the construction of skyscrapers, particularly in New York. In other words, the same construction boom that is making Queens into a valley of ashes is also buoying up the new moneyed class that populates West Egg.

In the valley, there is such a thick coating gray dust that it looks like everything is made out of this ashy substance. It's important to note that from a general description of people as "ash-grey men" we now see that ashy description applied specifically to George Wilson. He is covered in a "veil" of desolation, sadness, hopelessness, and everything else associated with the ash.

Also, we see that Myrtle Wilson is the only thing that isn't covered by ash. She visually stands out from her surroundings since she doesn't blend into the "cement color" around her. This makes sense since she is an ambitious character who is eager to escape her life. Notice that she literally steps towards Tom, allying herself with a rich man who is only passing through the ash heaps on his way from somewhere better to somewhere better.

While West and East Egg are the settings for the ridiculously extravagance of both the old and new money crowd, and Manhattan the setting for business and organized crime, the valley of ashes tends to be where the novel situates the grubby and underhanded manipulations that show the darker side of the surrounding glamor.

Check out just how many unethical things are going on here:

• Gatsby wants Nick to set him up with Daisy so they can have an affair.

• Mrs. Wilson's "panting vitality" reminds us of her thoroughly unpleasant relationship with Tom.

• A policeman lets Gatsby off the hook for speeding because of Gatsby's connections.

• Nick jokes about Gatsby's shady-sounding story about being an Oxford man.

• Gatsby hints at doing something probably illegal for the police commissioner (possibly supplying him with alcohol?) that makes the commissioner be permanently in his pocket.

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

The final reference to the ashheaps is at the moment of the murder-suicide, as George skulks towards Gatsby floating in his pool. Again, the ashy world is "fantastic"—a word that smacks of scary fairy tales and ghost stories, particularly when combined with the eerie description of Wilson as a "gliding figure" and the oddly shapeless and out of focus ("amorphous") trees.

It's significant that what threatens the fancy world of the Eggs is the creeping encroachment of the ash that they so look down on and are so disgusted by.

Key Quotes From Each Great GatsbyChapter

Click on the chapter number to read a summary, important character beats, and the themes and symbols the chapter connects with!

Chapter 1 Quotes

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

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

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

Daisy tells Nick that these are the first words she said after giving birth to her daughter.

This funny and depressing take on what it takes to succeed as a woman in Daisy's world is a good lens into why she acts the way she does. Because she has never had to struggle for anything, because of her material wealth and the fact that she has no ambitions or goals, her life feels empty and meaningless to her. In a way, this wish for her daughter to be a "fool" is coming from a good place. Based on her own experiences, she assumes that a woman who is too stupid to realize that her life is pointless will be happier than one (like Daisy herself) who is restless and filled with existential ennui (which is a fancy way of describing being bored of one's existence).

The first time Nick sees him, Gatsby is making this half-prayerful gesture to the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. This is our first glimpse of his obsession and his quest for the unobtainable.Gatsby makes this reaching movement several times throughout the book, each time because something he has strived for is just out of his grasp.

Chapter 2 Quotes

Every time anyone goes from Long Island to Manhattan or back, they go through this depressing industrial area in the middle of Queens. The factories located here pollute the air and land around them—their detritus is what makes the "ash" dust that covers everything and everyone. This is theplace where those who cannot succeed in the rat race end up, hopeless and lacking any way to escape. Check out our focused article for a much more in-depth analysis of what the crucial symbol of "the valley of ashes" stands for in this novel.

There is no God in the novel. None of the characters seems to be religious, no one wonders about the moral or ethical implications of any actions, and in the end, there are no punishments doled out to the bad or rewards given to the good. This lack of religious feeling is partly what makes Tom's lie to Myrtle about Daisy being a Catholic particularly egregious. This lack of even a basic moral framework is underscored by the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, a giant billboard that is as close as this world gets to having a watchful authoritative presence.

This chapter is our main exposure to Myrtle Wilson, Tom's mistress. Here, we see the main points of her personality—or at least the way that she comes across to Nick. First, it's interesting to note that aside from Tom, whose hulkish physique Nick really pays a lot of attention to, Myrtle is the only character whose physicality is dwelt on at length. We hear a lot about her body and the way she moves in space—here, we not only get her "sweeping" across the room, "expanding," and "revolving," but also the sense that her "gestures" are somehow "violent." It makes sense that for Nick, who is into the cool and detached Jordan, Myrtle's overenthusiastic affect is a little off-putting. But remember this focus on Myrtle's body when you read Chapter 7, where this body will be exposed in a shocking way.

This bit of violence succinctly encapsulates Tom's brutality, how little he thinks of Myrtle, and it also speaks volumes about their vastly unequal and disturbing relationship. Two things to think about:

#1: Why doesn't Tom want Myrtle to mention Daisy? It could be a way of maintaining discretion—to keep secret her identity in order to hide the affair. But, considering everyone in town apparently knows about Myrtle, this doesn't seem to be the reason. More likely is the fact that Tom does actually hold Daisy in much higher regard than Myrtle, and he refuses to let the lower class woman "degrade" his high-class wife by talking about her freely. This is yet again an example of his extreme snobbery.

#2: Tom is a person who uses his body to get what he wants. Sometimes this is within socially acceptable boundaries—for example, on the football field at Yale—and sometimes it is to browbeat everyone around him into compliance. It's also interesting that both Tom and Myrtle are such physically present characters in the novel—in this moment, Myrtle is the only character that actually stands up to Tom. In a way, they are a perfect match.

Chapter 3 Quotes

Gatsby's parties are the epitome of anonymous, meaningless excess—so much so that people treat his house as a kind of public, or at least commercial, space rather than a private home. This is connected to the vulgarity of new money—you can't imagine Tom and Daisy throwing a party like this. Or Nick for that matter. The random and meaningless indulgence of his parties further highlights Gatsby's isolation from true friends. As Jordan says later, large parties are great because they provide privacy/intimacy, so Gatsby stands alone in a sea of strangers having their own intimate moments.

Belasco was a renowned theatrical producer, so comparing Gatsby to him here is a way of describing the library as a stage set for a play—in other words, as a magnificent and convincing fake. This sea of unread books is either yet more tremendous waste of resources, or a kind of miniature example of the fact that a person's core identity remains the same no matter how many layers of disguise are placed on top.

Gatsby has the money to buy these books, but he lacks the interest, depth, time, or ambition to read and understand them, which is similar to how he regards his quest to get Daisy.

Lots of Gatsby's appeal lies in his ability to instantly connect with the person he is speaking to, to make that person feel important and valued. This is probably what makes him a great front man for Wolfsheim's bootlegging enterprise, and connects him with Daisy, who also has a preternaturally appealing quality—her voice.

The offhanded misogyny of this remark that Nick makes about Jordan is telling in a novel where women are generally treated as objects at worst or lesser beings at best. Even our narrator, ostensibly a tolerant and nonjudgmental observer, here reveals a core of patriarchal assumptions that run deep.

There are layers of meaning and humor here.

First, the humor:

• While in Christian tradition there is the concept of cardinal virtues, honesty is not one of them. So here, since the phrase "cardinal sin" is the more familiar concept, there is a small joke that Nick's honesty is actually a negative quality, a burden.

• Nick is telling us about his scrupulous honesty a second after he's revealed that he's been writing love letters to a girl back home every week despite wanting to end their relationship, and despite dating a girl at his office, and then dating Jordan in the meantime. So honesty to Nick doesn't really mean what it might to most people.

Second, the meaning:

What does it mean to have our narrator tell us in one breath that he is honest to a fault, and that he doesn't think that most other people are honest? This sounds like a humblebrag kind of observation. But also, we need to question Nick's ability to understand/empathize with other people if he thinks he is on such a removed plane of existence from them. And of course since he just showed us that he is not actually all that honest only a paragraph ago, we need to realize that his narration is probably not completely factual/accurate/truthful. Plus, this observation comes at the end of the third chapter, after we've met all the major players finally—so it's like the board has been set, and now we finally have enough information to distrust our narrator.

Chapter 4 Quotes

The more Gatsby seems to reveal about himself, the more he deepens the mystery—it's amazing how clichéd and yet how intriguing the "sad thing" he mentions immediately is. It's also interesting that Gatsby uses his origin story as a transaction—he's not sharing his past with Nick to form a connection, but as advance payment for a favor. At the same time, there's a lot of humor in this scene. Imagine any time you told anyone something about yourself, you then had to whip out some physical object to prove it was true!

In a novel so concerned with fitting in, with rising through social ranks, and with having the correct origins, it's always interesting to see where those who fall outside this ranking system are mentioned. Just he earlier described loving the anonymity of Manhattan, here Nick finds himself enjoying a similar melting-pot quality as he sees an indistinctly ethnic funeral procession ("south-eastern Europe" most likely means the people are Greek) and a car with both black and white people in it.

What is now racist terminology is here used pejoratively, but not necessarily with the same kind of blind hatred that Tom demonstrates. Instead, Nick can see that within the black community there are also social ranks and delineations—he distinguishes between the way the five black men in the car are dressed, and notes that they feel ready to challenge him and Gatsby in some car-related way. Do they want to race? To compare clothing? It's unclear, but it adds to the sense of possibility that the drive to Manhattan always represents in the book.

Nick's amazement at the idea of one man being behind an enormous event like the fixed World Series is telling. For one thing, the powerful gangster as a prototype of pulling-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps, self-starting man, which the American Dream holds up as a paragon of achievement, mocks this individualist ideal.

It also connects Gatsby to the world of crime, swindling, and the underhanded methods necessary to effect enormous change. In a smaller, less criminal way, watching Wolfshiem maneuver has clearly rubbed off on Gatsby and his convolutedly large-scale scheme to get Daisy's attention by buying an enormous mansion nearby.

Nick thinks this about Jordan while they are kissing. Two things to ponder:

• Which one does he think he is: the pursued or the pursuing? The busy or the tired? Perhaps we are meant to match these adjectives up to the two people involved in the main love story, in which case Gatsby is both the pursuing and the busy, while Daisy is the pursued and the tired.

• If Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby are locked into a romantic triangle (or square, if we include Myrtle), then Jordan and Nick are vying for the position of narrator. Nick presents himself as the objective, nonjudgmental observer—the confidant of everyone he meets. So it's interesting that here we get his perspective on Jordan's narrative style—"universal skepticism"—right after she gets to take over telling the story for a huge chunk of the chapter. Which is the better approach, we are being asked, the overly credulous or the jaded and disbelieving? Are we more likely to believe Jordan when she says something positive about someone since she is so quick to find fault? For example, it seems important that she be the one to state that Daisy hasn't had any affairs, not Nick.

Chapter 5 Quotes

Nick recognizes that what he quickly dismissed in the moment could easily have been the moral quandary that altered his whole future. It seems that Nick thinks this was his chance to enter the world of crime—if we assume that what Gatsby was proposing is some kind of insider trading or similarly illegal speculative activity—and be thus trapped on the East Coast rather than retreating to the Midwest.

It's striking that Nick recognizes that his ultimate weakness—the thing that can actually tempt him—is money. In this way, he is different from Gatsby, whose temptation is love, and Tom, whose temptation is sex—and of course, he is also different because he resists the temptation rather than going all-in. Although Nick's refusal could be spun as a sign of his honesty, it instead underscores how much he adheres to rules of politeness. After all, he only rejects the idea because he feels he "had no choice" about the proposal because it was "tactless." Who knows what shenanigans Nick would have been on board with if only Gatsby were a little smoother in his approach?

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

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

Chapter 6 Quotes

Here is the clearest connection of Gatsby and the ideal of the independent, individualistic, self-made man—the ultimate symbol of the American Dream. It's telling that in describing Gatsby this way, Nick also links him to other ideas of perfection.

• First, he references Plato's philosophical construct of the ideal form—a completely inaccessible perfect object that exists outside of our real existence.

• Second, Nick references various Biblical luminaries like Adam and Jesus who are called "son of God" in the New Testament—again, linking Gatsby to mythic and larger than life beings who are far removed from lived experience. Gatsby's self-mythologizing is in this way part of a grander tradition of myth-making.

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

Just as earlier we were treated to Jordan as a narrator stand-in, now we have a new set of eyes through which to view the story—Daisy's. Her snobbery is deeply ingrained, and she doesn't do anything to hide it or overcome it (unlike Nick, for example). Like Jordan, Daisy is judgmental and critical. Unlike Jordan, Daisy expresses this through "emotion" rather than cynical mockery. Either way, what Daisy doesn't like is that the nouveau riche haven't learned to hide their wealth under a veneer of gentility—full of the "raw vigor" that has very recently gotten them to this station in life, they are too obviously materialistic. Their "simplicity" is their single-minded devotion to money and status, which in her mind makes the journey from birth to death ("from nothing to nothing") meaningless.

Hang on to this piece of information—it will be important later. This is really symptomatic ofGatsby's absolutist feelings towards Daisy. It's not enough for her to leave Tom. Instead, Gatsby expects Daisy to repudiate her entire relationship with Tom in order to show that she has always been just as monomaniacally obsessed with him as he has been with her. The problem is that this robs her of her humanity and personhood—she is not exactly like him, and it's unhealthy that he demands for her to be an identical reflection of his mindset.

This is one of the most famous quotations from the novel. Gatsby's blind faith in his ability to recreate some quasi-fictional past that he's been dwelling on for five years is both a tribute to his romantic and idealistic nature (the thing that Nick eventually decides makes him "great") and a clear indication that he just might be a completely delusional fantasist. So far in his life, everything that he's fantasized about when he first imagined himself as Jay Gatsby has come true. But in that transformation, Gatsby now feels like he has lost a fundamental piece of himself—the thing he "wanted to recover."

Just as Gatsby is searching for an unrecoverable piece of himself, so Nick also has a moment of wanting to connect with something that seems familiar but is out of reach. In a nice bit of subtle snobbery, Nick dismisses Gatsby's description of his love for Daisy as treacly nonsense ("appalling sentimentality"), but finds his own attempt to remember a snippet of a love song or poem as a mystically tragic bit of disconnection. This gives us a quick glimpse into Nick the character—a pragmatic man who is quick to judge others (much quicker than his self-assessment as an objective observer would have us believe) and who is far more self-centered than he realizes.

Chapter 7 Quotes

This is our first and only chance to see Daisy performing motherhood. And "performing" is the right word, since everything about Daisy's actions here rings a little false and her cutesy sing song a little bit like an act. The presence of the nurse makes it clear that, like many upper-class women of the time, Daisy does not actually do any child rearing.

At the same time, this is the moment when Gatsby's delusional dreams start breaking down. The shock and surprise that he experiences when he realizes that Daisy really does have a daughter with Tom show how little he has thought about the fact the Daisy has had a life of her own outside of him for the last five years. The existence of the child is proof of Daisy's separate life, and Gatsby simply cannot handle then she is not exactly as he has pictured her to be.

Finally, here we can see how Pammy is being bred for her life as a future "beautiful little fool", as Daisy put it. As Daisy's makeup rubs onto Pammy's hair, Daisy prompts her reluctant daughter to be friendly to two strange men.

Comparing and contrasting Daisy and Jordan) is one of the most common assignments that you will get when studying this novel. This very famous quotation is a great place to start.

Daisy's attempt at a joke reveals her fundamental boredom and restlessness. Despite the fact that she has social standing, wealth, and whatever material possessions she could want, she is not happy in her endlessly monotonous and repetitive life. This existential ennui goes a long way to helping explain why she seizes on Gatsby as an escape from routine.

On the other hand, Jordan is a pragmatic and realistic person, who grabs opportunities and who sees possibilities and even repetitive cyclical moments of change. For example here, although fall and winter are most often linked to sleep and death, whereas it is spring that is usually seen as the season of rebirth, for Jordan any change brings with it the chance for reinvention and new beginnings.

Here we are getting to the root of what it is really that attracts Gatsby so much to Daisy.

Nick notes that the way Daisy speaks to Gatsby is enough to reveal their relationship to Tom. Once again we see the powerful attraction of Daisy's voice. For Nick, this voice is full of "indiscretion," an interesting word that at the same time brings to mind the revelation of secrets and the disclosure of illicit sexual activity. Nick has used this word in this connotation before—when describing Myrtle in Chapter 2 he uses the word "discreet" several times to explain the precautions she takes to hide her affair with Tom.

But for Gatsby, Daisy's voice does not hold this sexy allure, as much as it does the promise of wealth, which has been his overriding ambition and goal for most of his life. To him, her voice marks her as a prize to be collected. This impression is further underscored by the fairy tale imagery that follows the connection of Daisy's voice to money. Much like princesses who is the end of fairy tales are given as a reward to plucky heroes, so too Daisy is Gatsby's winnings, an indication that he has succeeded.

Nick never sees Tom as anything other than a villain; however, it is interesting that only Tom immediately sees Gatsby for the fraud that he turns out to be. Almost from the get-go, Tom calls it that Gatsby's money comes from bootlegging or some other criminal activity. It is almost as though Tom's life of lies gives him special insight into detecting the lies of others.

You will also often be asked to compare Tom and Wilson, two characters who share some plot details in common.This passage, which explicitly contrasts these two men's reactions to finding out their wives are having affairs, is a great place to start.

• Tom's response to Daisy and Gatsby's relationship is to immediately do everything to display his power. He forces a trip to Manhattan, demands that Gatsby explain himself, systematically dismantles the careful image and mythology that Gatsby has created, and finally makes Gatsby drive Daisy home to demonstrate how little he has to fear from them being alone together.

• Wilson also tries to display power. But he is so unused to wielding it that his best effort is to lock Myrtle up and then to listen to her emasculating insults and provocations. Moreover, rather than relaxing under this power trip, Wilson becomes physically ill, feeling guilty both about his part in driving his wife away and about manhandling her into submission.

• Finally, it is interesting that Nick renders these reactions as health-related. Whose response does Nick view as "sick" and whose as "well"? It is tempting to connect Wilson's bodily response to the word "sick," but the ambiguity is purposeful. Is it sicker in this situation to take a power-hungry delight in eviscerating a rival, Tom-style, or to be overcome on a psychosomatic level, like Wilson?

Nick is happy whenever he gets to demonstrate how undereducated and dumb Tom actually is. Here, Tom's anger at Daisy and Gatsby is somehow transformed into a self-pitying and faux righteous rant about miscegenation, loose morals, and the decay of stalwart institutions. We see the connection between Jordan and Nick when both of them puncture Tom's pompous balloon: Jordan points out that race isn't really at issue at the moment, and Nick laughs at the hypocrisy of a womanizer like Tom suddenly lamenting his wife's lack of prim propriety.

Gatsby throws caution to the wind and reveals the story that he has been telling himself about Daisy all this time. In his mind, Daisy has been pining for him as much as he has been longing for her, and he has been able to explain her marriage to himself simply by eliding any notion that she might have her own hopes, dreams, ambitions, and motivations. Gatsby has been propelled for the last five years by the idea that he has access to what is in Daisy's heart. However, we can see that a dream built on this kind of shifting sand is at best wishful thinking and at worst willful self-delusion.

Gatsby wants nothing less than that Daisy erase the last five years of her life. He is unwilling to accept the idea that Daisy has had feelings for someone other than him, that she has had a history that does not involve him, and that she has not spent every single second of every day wondering when he would come back into her life. His absolutism is a form of emotional blackmail.

For all Daisy's evident weaknesses, it is a testament to her psychological strength that she is simply unwilling to recreate herself, her memories, and her emotions in Gatsby's image. She could easily at this point say that she has never loved Tom, but this would not be true, and she does not want to give up her independence of mind. Unlike Gatsby, who against all evidence to the contrary believes that you can repeat the past, Daisy wants to know that there is a future. She wants Gatsby to be the solution to her worries about each successive future day, rather than an imprecation about the choices she has made to get to this point.

At the same time, it's key to note Nick's realization that Daisy "had never intended on doing anything at all." Daisy has never planned to leave Tom. We've known this ever since the first time we saw them at the end of Chapter 1, when he realized that they were cemented together in their dysfunction.

The appearance of Daisy's daughter and Daisy's declaration that at some point in her life she loved Tom have both helped to crush Gatsby's obsession with his dream. In just the same way, Tom's explanations about who Gatsby really is and what is behind his facade have broken Daisy's infatuation. Take note of the language here—as Daisy is withdrawing from Gatsby, we come back to the image of Gatsby with his arms outstretched, trying to grab something that is just out of reach. In this case it's not just Daisy herself, but also his dream of being with her inside his perfect memory.

Myrtle fights by provoking and taunting. Here, she is pointing out Wilson's weak and timid nature by egging him on to treat her the way that Tom did when he punched her earlier in the novel.

However, before we draw whatever conclusions we can about Myrtle from this exclamation, it's worthwhile to think about the context of this remark.

• First, we are getting this speech third-hand. This is Nick telling us what Michaelis described overhearing, so Myrtle's words have gone through a double male filter.

• Second, Myrtle's words stand in isolation. We have no idea what Wilson has been saying to her to provoke this attack. What we do know is that however "powerless" Wilson might be, he still has power enough to imprison his wife in their house and to unilaterally uproot and move her several states away against her will. Neither Nick nor Michaelis remarks on whether either of these exercises of unilateral power over Myrtle is appropriate or fair—it is simply expected that this is what a husband can do to a wife.

So what do we make of the fact that Myrtle was trying to verbally emasculate her husband? Maybe yelling at him is her only recourse in a life where she has no actual ability to control her life or bodily integrity.

The stark contrast here between the oddly ghostly nature of the car that hits Myrtle and the visceral, gruesome, explicit imagery of what happens to her body after it is hit is very striking. The car almost doesn't seem real—it comes out of the darkness like an avenging spirit and disappears, Michaelis cannot tell what color it is. Meanwhile, Myrtle's corpse is described in detail and is palpably physical and present.

This treatment of Myrtle's body might be one place to go when you are asked to compare Daisy and Myrtle in class. Daisy's body is never even described, beyond a gentle indication that she prefers white dresses that are flouncy and loose. On the other hand, every time that we see Myrtle in the novel, her body is physically assaulted or appropriated. Tom initially picks her up by pressing his body inappropriately into hers on the train station platform. Before her party, Tom has sex with her while Nick (a man who is a stranger to Myrtle) waits in the next room, and then Tom ends the night by punching her in the face. Finally, she is restrained by her husband inside her house and then run over.

And so, the promise that Daisy and Tom are a dysfunctional couple that somehow makes it work (Nick saw this at the end of Chapter 1) is fulfilled. For careful readers of the novel, this conclusion should have been clear from the get-go. Daisy complains about Tom, and Tom serially cheats on Daisy, but at the end of the day, they are unwilling to forgo the privileges their life entitles them to.

This moment of truth has stripped Daisy and Tom down to the basics. They are in the least showy room of their mansion, sitting with simple and unpretentious food, and they have been stripped of their veneer. Their honesty makes what they are doing—conspiring to get away with murder, basically—completely transparent. And it is the fact that they can tolerate this level of honesty in each other besides each being kind of a terrible person that keeps them together.

Compare their readiness to forgive each other anything—even murder!—with Gatsby's insistence that it's his way or no way.

Chapter 8 Quotes

The reason the word "nice" is in quotation marks is that Gatsby does not mean that Daisy is the first pleasant or amiable girl that he has met. Instead, the word "nice" here means refined, having elegant and elevated taste, picky and fastidious. In other words, from the very beginning what Gatsby most values about Daisy is that she belongs to that set of society that he is desperately trying to get into: the wealthy, upper echelon. Just like when he noted the Daisy's voice has money in it, here Gatsby almost cannot separate Daisy herself from the beautiful house that he falls in love with.

Notice also how much he values quantity of any kind—it's wonderful that the house has many bedrooms and corridors, and it's also wonderful that many men want Daisy. Either way, it's the quantity itself that "increases value." It's almost like Gatsby's love is operating in a market economy—the more demand there is for a particular good, the higher the worth of that good. Of course, thinking in this way makes it easy to understand why Gatsby is able to discard Daisy's humanity and inner life when he idealizes her.

This description of Daisy's life apart from Gatsby clarifies why she picks Tom in the end and goes back to her hopeless ennui and passive boredom: this is what she has grown up doing and is used to. Daisy's life seems fancy. After all, there are orchids and orchestras and golden shoes.

But already, even for the young people of high society, death and decay loom large. In this passage for example, not only is the orchestra's rhythm full of sadness, but the orchids are dying, and the people themselves look like flowers past their prime. In the midst of this stagnation, Daisy longs for stability, financial security, and routine. Tom offered that then, and he continues to offer it now.

Even though he can now no longer be an absolutist about Daisy's love, Gatsby is still trying to think about her feelings on his own terms. After admitting that the fact that many men loved Daisy before him is a positive, Gatsby is willing to admit that maybe Daisy had feelings for Tom after all, just as long as her love for Gatsby was supreme.

Gatsby is ambiguous admission that "it was just personal" carries several potential meanings:

• Nick assumes that the word "it" refers to Gatsby's love, which Gatsby is describing as "personal" as a way of emphasizing how deep and inexplicable his feelings for Daisy are.

• But of course, the word "it" could just as easily be referring to Daisy's decision to marry Tom. In this case, what is "personal" are Daisy's reasons (the desire for status and money), which are hers alone, and have no bearing on the love that she and Gatsby feel for each other.

Once again Gatsby is trying to reach something that is just out of grasp, a gestural motif that recurs frequently in this novel. Here already, even as a young man, he is trying to grab hold of an ephemeral memory.

It's interesting that here Nick suddenly tells us that he disapproves of Gatsby. One way to interpret this is that during that fateful summer, Nick did indeed disapprove of what he saw, but has since come to admire and respect Gatsby, and it is that respect and admiration that come through in the way he tells the story most of the time.

It's also telling that Nick sees the comment he makes to Gatsby as a compliment. At best, it is a backhanded one—he is saying that Gatsby is better than a rotten crowd, but that is a bar set very low (if you think about it, it's like saying "you're so much smarter than that chipmunk!" and calling that high praise). Nick's description of Gatsby's outfit as both "gorgeous" and a "rag" underscores this sense of condescension. The reason Nick thinks that he is praising Gatsby by saying this is that suddenly, in this moment, Nick is able to look past his deeply and sincerely held snobbery, and to admit that Jordan, Tom, and Daisy are all horrible people despite being upper crust.

Still, backhanded as it is, this compliment also meant to genuinely make Gatsby feel a bit better. Since Gatsby cares so, so much about entering the old money world, it makes Nick glad to be able to tell Gatsby that he is so much better than the crowd he's desperate to join.

Jordan's pragmatic opportunism, which has so far been a positive foil to Daisy's listless inactivity, is suddenly revealed to be an amoral and self-involved way of going through life. Instead of being affected one way or another by Myrtle's horrible death, Jordan's takeaway from the previous day is that Nick simply wasn't as attentive to her as she would like.

Nick is staggered by the revelation that the cool aloofness that he liked so much throughout the summer—possibly because it was a nice contrast to the girl back home that Nick thought was overly attached to their non-engagement—is not actually an act. Jordan really doesn't care about other people, and she really can just shrug off seeing Myrtle's mutilated corpse and focus on whether Nick was treating her right. Nick, who has been trying to assimilate this kind of thinking all summer long, finds himself shocked back into his Middle West morality here.

Clearly Wilson has been psychologically shaken first by Myrtle's affair and then by her death—he is seeing the giant eyes of the optometrist billboard as a stand-in for God. But this delusion underlines the absence of any higher power in the novel. In the lawless, materialistic East, there is no moral center which could rein in people's darker, immoral impulses. The motif of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg's eyes runs through the novel, as Nick notes them watching whatever goes on in the ashheaps. Here, that motif comes to a crescendo. Arguably, when Michaelis dispels Wilson's delusion about the eyes, he takes away the final barrier to Wilson's unhinged revenge plot. If there is no moral authority watching, anything goes.

Nick tries to imagine what it might be like to be Gatsby, but a Gatsby without the activating dream that has spurred him throughout his life. For Nick, this would be the loss of the aesthetic sense—an inability to perceive beauty in roses or sunlight. The idea of fall as a new, but horrifying, world of ghosts and unreal material contrasts nicely with Jordan's earlier idea that fall brings with it rebirth.

Chapter 9 Quotes

Just like during his life, after his death, rumors swirl around Gatsby. Usually, death makes people treat even the most ambiguous figures with the respect that's supposedly owed to the dead. But Gatsby's death only invites more speculation, gawking, and a circus-like atmosphere. Note that even here, Nick still does not acknowledge his feelings of friendship and admiration for Gatsby. Instead, he claims to be the point person for Gatsby is funeral because of a general sense that "everyone" deserves someone to take a personal interest. But of course, there is no such right, as evidenced by the fact that Nick is the only person who cares about Gatsby as a human being rather than a sideshow.

Gatsby's father is the only person who has the kind of response to this mansion that Gatsby could have hoped for. Everyone else has found it either gaudy, vulgar, or fake. Perhaps this shows that for all his attempts to cultivate himself, Gatsby could never escape the tastes and ambitions of a Midwestern farm boy.

Gatsby was unable to parlay his hospitality into any genuine connection with anyone besides Nick, who seems to have liked him despite the parties rather than because of them. This highlights aclash of values between the new, anything-goes East and the older, more traditionally correct West. The East is a place where someone could come to a party and then insult the host—and then imply that a murdered man had it coming! Compare this to the moment when Gatsby feels uneasy making a scene when having lunch with Tom and Daisy because "I can't say anything in his house, old sport." (7.102).

Wolfshiem's refusal to come to Gatsby's funeral is extremely self-serving. He is using this quasi-philosophical excuse in order to protect himself from being anywhere near a crime scene. However, in a novel which is at least partly concerned with how morality can be generated in a place devoid of religion, Wolfshiem's explanation of his behavior confirms that the culmination of this kind of thinking is treating people as disposable.

It also plays into the novel's overriding idea that the American Dream is based on a willful desire to forget and ignore the past, instead straining for a potentially more exciting or more lucrative future. Part of forgetting the past is forgetting the people that are no longer here, so for Wolfshiem, even a close relationship like the one he had with Gatsby has to immediately be pushed to the side once Gatsby is no longer alive.

The theme of forgetting continues here. For Nick, Gatsby the man is already "too far away" to remember distinctly. Perhaps it is this kind of forgetting that allows Nick to think about Daisy without anger. On the one hand, in order to continue through life, you need to be able to separate yourself from the tragedies that have befallen. But on the other hand, this easy letting go of painful memories in the past leads to the kind of abandonment that follows Gatsby's death.

All along, the novel has juxtaposed the values and attitudes of the rich to those of the lower classes. However here, in this chapter, as Nick is starting to pull away from New York, the contrast shifts to comparing the values of the Midwest to those of the East. Here, the dim lights, the realness, and the snow are natural foils for the bright lights and extremely hot weather associated in the novel with Long Island and the party scene.

Nick's summary judgment of Tom and Daisy seems harsh but fair. They are people who do not have to answer for their actions and are free to ignore the consequences of what they do. This is one of the ways in which their marriage, dysfunctional as it is, works well. They both understand that they just don't need to worry about anything that happens in the same way that everyone else does. It is interesting to consider how this cycle will perpetuate itself with Pammy, their daughter.

It's fitting that Nick feels responsible for erasing the bad word. His whole project in this book has been to protect Gatsby's reputation and to establish his legacy. Otherwise, without someone to notice and remark on Gatsby's achievement, nothing would remain to indicate that this man had managed to elevate himself from a Midwestern farm to glittering luxury.

Check out our very in-depth analysis of this extremely famous last sentence, last paragraphs, and last section of the book.

What's Next?

Want to show off your love of The Great Gatsby with a poster or t-shirt? Check out our list of the best Gatsby-themed decor and apparel.

Writing an essay about The Great Gatsby? We've got articles to help you compare and contrast the most common character pairings, show you how to do an in-depth character analysis, help you write about a theme, and teach you how to best analyze a symbol.

Digging into the plot? Check out our summary of the novel, explore the meaning of the title, get a sense of how the novel's beginning sets up the story, and why the last line of the novel has become one of the most famous in Western literature.