

"He's a bootlegger," said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers.
"One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.
Paul von Hindenburg
2nd President of Germany


“Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer.
It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed ‘This schedule in effect
July 5th, 1922.’ ”


Many came from East Egg, including:
 the Leeches,
 the Voltaire's,
 the Blackbuck's,
 the Dancies,

Mr. Whitebait,
 the Fishguard's,

Maurice Flink,
 the Hammerhead's.

Guests from West Egg included:
 the Poles,
 the Catlip's,

James B. ("Rot-gut") Ferret.


Other guests included:

Francis Bull and George
Duckweed (theatrical people),

Klipspringer (who came so often he was called the boarder),
 the Chromes, the
Backhysson's, S.W. Belcher,
Miss Haag, P. Jewett, and
Claudia Hip.


Nick begins to tell about the first time Gatsby comes to his home.

He has arrived in his elegant automobile to take Nick into the city for lunch.

During the drive,
Gatsby asks Nick,
 “What's your opinion of me anyhow?”


He first says he is the son of a wealthy family from the “middle-west.”

He then adds he was educated at Oxford,


He inherited a great deal of money, and then “lived like a young raja in all the capitals of
Europe...
 collecting jewels,
 hunting big game,
 painting a little...
 and trying to forget something very sad that had happened…..


He then tells about joining the war in hopes of getting killed,
 but instead he receives decorations for his bravery from every Allied government.

Nick's first reaction is to laugh


Then his neighbor pulls out a war medal from
Montenegro, and to Nick's astonishment, it almost looks real.
* Montenegro is a country located in southeastern Europe. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea to the south, and borders Croatia on the west, Bosnia and
Herzegovina on the northwest,
Serbia on the northeast and
Albania on the southeast

 “Here's another thing I always carry. A souvenir of
Oxford days.”
 It was a photograph of half a dozen young men ….

There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger - with a cricket bat in his hand.


“I'm going to make a big request of you to-day, so I thought you ought to know something about me. I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody.”
 Nick then learns that Gatsby will not make his request personally. Instead, he has asked Jordan
Baker to discuss the matter with Nick at tea.


In a well - fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met
Gatsby for lunch
 Nick finds him seated with Meyer Wolfsheim, a man in his fifties who wears human molars as cuff links.
 During their meal, Wolfsheim broods about Rosy
Rosenthal's murder at the Metropole years before


Rosy Rosenthal (an actual gangster) was killed in a hail of machinegun bullets as he stepped outside the dining room of the old
Metropol Hotel in 1913

This same hotel is now known as the Casablanca
Hotel

 After lunch, Gatsby tells Nick that Wolfsheim is the man who fixed the World Series in 1919.
 Nick, with his proper
Midwestern upbringing, is shocked.

 Jordan begins telling Nick a story about Daisy when they were both young girls back in
Louisville in 1917.
 Daisy, at age 18, was the richest and most popular girl in town.
 One spring day Jordan spied her sitting in her white roadster with a handsome lieutenant, whom Daisy introduced as Jay Gatsby.



Soon, however, rumors circulated about Daisy trying to run away to say good-bye to a soldier who was going overseas, but her family stopped her….
 Daisy seemed to brood for a few months, but by autumn she appeared as happy as ever…..

 She had a debut after the Armistice
 In February she was presumably engaged to a man from New
Orleans.
 In June she married Tom
Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than
Louisville ever knew before.


He came down with a hundred people in four private cars
 Hired a whole floor of the
Seelbach Hotel
 The day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

 Daisy married Tom
Buchanan and soon began their lengthy travels.


Almost immediately, Tom started to see other women
Daisy‘s misery began.

 When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza

 and were driving in a victoria through Central Park.
They heard people singing “I'm the
Sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you're are asleep Into your tent I'll creep...”
* Victoria: a low, light, four-wheeled carriage



Jordan surprises Nick by telling him that “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”
“Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.”


“He wants to know if you'll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.”
 The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion….. so that he could “come over.” some afternoon to a stranger's garden.


“Why didn't he ask you to arrange a meeting?”

“He wants her to see his house,” she explained. “And your house is right next door.”

“I don't want to do anything out of the way!” he kept saying. “I want to see her right next door.”


“And Daisy ought to have something in her life,” murmured Jordan to me.

“Does she want to see Gatsby?”

“She's not to know about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know. You're just supposed to invite her to tea.”


We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninth Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park….
 I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms.
Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.