Chapter Six:
I. First, let’s untangle the timeline. Put these events in chronological order:
____Gatsby works on Dan Cody’s yacht
____Gatsby and Daisy kiss under the moonlight
____Jordan sees Daisy and Gatsby in Daisy’s white roadster
____“Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, [springs] from his Platonic conception of himself.”
II. Now, some questions about key passages, as well as some vocabulary to help you along the way
A. James Gatz becomes Jay Gatbsy, pages 98-99.
What is a “Platonic conception” of oneself? And how could you “spring from” your own P.C.?
What was happening as Gatz/Gatsby lay in bed at night?
 Platonic = in manner or style of the philosopher Plato and his guru, Socrates. Here, Platonic”
refers to Socrates’s doctrine that abstract nouns/concepts such as justice, love, beauty, are real,
pure “essences” (“eidos” in Greek—from which we get our word “idea”) in the spiritual
world…and that the material world is just a poor reflection of the pure realities of the spiritual
world
 Conception = (1) a concept, idea, essence, or eidos; (2) the moment at which an egg is fertilized
and a (potential) new life is brought into existence
 Vulgar = lacking sophistication or taste, unrefined, overdone, showy, sometimes crassly sexual
 Meretricious = (1) apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity; valueless,
cheap, trashy, tawdry; (2) (archaic meaning) having to do with the traits of a prostitute
 Conceit = something conceived in mind, especially something fanciful; imagination, fancy, whim
 Ineffable = too great, powerful, or beautiful to be expressed or described in words; beyond
speech.
 Gaudiness = flashiness, tastelessness, showiness, vulgarity
 Oblivious = lacking all awareness or memory; unmindful
B. Gatsby and Daisy kiss under the moonlight, page 111.
What decision did Gatsby have to make in the moment when he kissed Daisy? Did he make the
right choice? What becomes incarnated in “the incarnation” that Nick refers to near the end of
the passage? What might Nick have said if he hadn’t lost the ability to speak at the end of the
chapter?
 Incarnation = a bodily manifestation of a supernatural being; the root word “carne” means
“flesh,” and incarnation is literally “put into flesh.” In Western cultures, The Incarnation is the
birth of Christ, in which the spirit of god enters into the body of Mary’s son Jesus.