The Great Gatsby
Chapter 2
Summary
• Tom introduces Nick to his
mistress, Myrtle Wilson
• Myrtle accompanies Tom
and Nick into the city,
where she buys cosmetics,
magazines and a dog.
• They go to an apartment in
New York, where a small
party takes place, involving
Myrtle’s sister Catherine, a
photographer named
McKee and his wife.
• The apartment in new York is kept especially
for Tom and Myrtle’s adulterous relationship.
Nick gradually gets drunk. Catherine mentions
the speculation surrounding Gatsby, specifically
that he is a relation of Kaiser Wilhelm, the
ruler of Germany during the First World War.
• Tom breaks Myrtle’s nose, because of her
continual repetition of Daisy’s name. Nick
leaves with McKee, who, in his drunkenness,
takes to his bed and shows Nick his
photographs. The chapter ends with Nick in
Pennsylvania Station, awaiting the 4a.m. train
home.
• This chapter is a sketch of a drinking party, and
F. Scott Fitzgerald shows the increasing
drunkenness of the company with great skill
through understatement. He avoids the large
and clumsy gestures suggested by intoxication,
but includes a moment where Nick, his reserve
broken down under the influence of alcohol.
This scene is set against the backdrop of
Prohibition in the United States.
• A National Prohibition Act was passed in the
United States in 1919 and remained in force
until 1933. It placed severe limitations upon
the production and consumption of alcoholic
drinks. It is hinted in the novel that Gatsby’s
wealth is due, in part at least, to his involvement
with bootlegging, the illicit supply of alcohol.
Nick Carraway
• The sequence of events leading up to and
occurring at the party define and contrast the
various characters in The Great Gatsby. Nick’s
reserved nature and indecisiveness show in the
fact that though he feels morally repelled by
the inappropriateness and poor taste of the
party, he is too fascinated by it to leave. This
contradiction suggests the uncertainty that he
feels toward the Buchanans, Gatsby, and the
East Coast in general.
• We are given a hint that he is not a fully
trustworthy narrator:
“Everything has a dim hazy cast over it”
George Wilson
• Wilson is a lifeless yet handsome man,
coloured gray by the ashes in the air.
• “A blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and
faintly handsome.”
• “walking through her husband as if
he were a ghost”
• “A white ashen dust veiled his dark
suit”
• Tom says: “He’s so dumb he doesn’t
know he’s alive”
Myrtle Wilson
• She is in total contrast to her husband
• She buys things- ‘Town Tattle’, a
magazine,
perfume, a puppy
• Tom’s relationship with her is physical
and material.
• Myrtle is a “thickish” woman, in the
“middle thirties, and faintly stout, but
carried her surplus flesh sensuously as
some women can.”
• Myrtle grows louder and more obnoxious
the more she drinks
• The author uses a simple conversation
between Myrtle and Tom to show the
intelligence level of Myrtle. When Tom buys
the dog for Myrtle and she asks if it is a boy
or a girl she is showing everyone that she is
not very intelligent. She is simply a "toy" for
Tom. He is not involved with her because of
her mind. He is strictly using her for his own
needs and desires. It should be a very
simple matter to determine the sex of a
puppy, but Myrtle doesn't have the presence
of mind to simply look at the puppy and find
out the sex for her self. This goes to the
characterisation of a woman who is not too
bright.
Tom Buchanan
• The party emphasises Tom's hypocrisy and lack
of restraint: he feels no guilt for betraying
Daisy with Myrtle, but he feels compelled to
keep Myrtle in her place. Tom appears to be a
boorish bully who uses his social status and
physical strength to control those around him—
he cleverly taunts Wilson while having an affair
with his wife, he feels no guilt for his immoral
behaviour, and does not hesitate to lash out
violently in order to maintain his control over
Myrtle. Wilson is a contrast, a handsome and
morally upright man who lacks money, privilege,
and vitality.
Catherine
• Myrtle’s sister
• A slender, worldly girl of about thirty,
with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and
a complexion powdered milky white.
• When she moved about there was an
incessant clicking as innumerable
pottery bracelets jingled up and down
upon her arms.
The McKees
Neighbours from downstairs
Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man
He was a photographer
She was shrill, languid, handsome
and horrible.
• She loudly complained to everyone
present about her husband George
•
•
•
•
Jay Gatsby
• Fitzgerald uses the party to
continue building a feeling of
mystery and excitement around
Gatsby, who has yet to make a
full appearance in the novel.
Here, Gatsby appear as a
mysterious subject of gossip. He
is extremely well known, but no
one seems to have any firm
information about him. The
ridiculous rumour Catherine
spreads shows the extent of the
public’s curiosity about him,
making him more intriguing to the
other characters in the novel and
the reader.
• But yet again, Gatsby is absent.
Setting
• The valley of the ashes is where New York’s ashes are
dumped.
• The men who live here work at shovelling up the ashes.
• In this industrial wasteland, which the commuter train
passes through, everything is covered with dust, smoke, and
ashes.
• The valley of the ashes is a picture of absolute desolation
and poverty.
• It symbolises moral decay and poverty hidden by the
beautiful disguise of the Eggs
• The unblinking eyes, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg,
watch over everything that happens in the valley of ashes.
• Nick describes the ‘valley of the ashes’, as a bleak area
between West Egg and New York City, presided over by the
huge bespectacled eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleberg, an
advertising display put up by an optician. It is here that
George Wilson, a car mechanic who runs a garage in this rundown spot.
• The description of the ‘valley of the ashes’
bring to mind the bleak spiritual landscape of
the T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’,
published in 1922, the year ‘The Great
Gatsby’ is set. ‘The Wasteland’ responds to
the horrific violence of the First World War
but also to the spread of materialistic,
consumer values in modern society.
• Doctor Eckleburg’s advertising board is a
realistic detail from the consumer culture of
the 1920s. A visual advertisement like this had
the added value of being understandable to
newly arrived immigrants who had little or no
grasp of English.
• The fourth and final setting of the novel,
New York City, is in every way the opposite
of the valley of ashes—it is loud, tasteless,
and glittering. To Nick, New York is all
together fascinating and repulsive, thrillingly
fast-paced and dazzling to look at but
lacking any morals. While Tom is forced to
keep his affair with Myrtle a relative secret
in the valley of the ashes, in New York he
can appear with her in public, even among his
acquaintances, without causing a scandal.
Even Nick, despite being Daisy’s cousin,
seems not to mind that Tom parades his
infidelity in public.
Party in New York
• There is a lot of gossip, some of it blatantly
untrue: Daisy was not a Catholic
• There is again a suggestion that there is a
class system at work: “that man’s way below
you!”
• The mood is broken by the sentence:
“Making a short deft movement, Tom
Buchanan broke her nose with his hand.”
Whisky and Gossip
• “They say Gatsby’s a nephew or a cousin
of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's where all
his money comes from.”
• “Neither of them can stand the person
they're married to.”
More Whisky and Gossip
• Catherine leaned close to me and whispered
in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the
person they're married to."
• "When they do get married," continued
Catherine, "they're going West to live for a
while until it blows over."
• "She really ought to get away from him,"
resumed Catherine to me. "They've been
living over that garage for eleven years. And
tom's the first sweetie she ever had."
The Party’s Over
• Nick describes himself at the party as being
"within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled
by the inexhaustible variety of life."
• The spell of the party, however, is broken around
midnight when Tom and Myrtle argue loudly over
her talking about Daisy.
• Tom insists that she must not even mention his
wife's name.
• When Myrtle taunts him by shouting, "Daisy!
Daisy!...I'll say it whenever I want to," Tom answers
by striking her face and breaking her nose.
• Nick's sense of moral order is repulsed by the
violence, and he leaves in an alcoholic stupor, finally
catching the 4:00 a.m. train back to West Egg.
Symbolism
• The valley of the Ashes symbolises moral decay.
• The undefined significance of Doctor T. J.
Eckleburg’s ugly, bespectacled eyes gazing down from
their billboard makes them troubling to the reader:
in this chapter, Fitzgerald preserves their mystery,
giving them no symbolic value. Inexplicably, the eyes
simply “brood on over the solemn dumping ground.”
Perhaps the most persuasive reading of the eyes at
this point in the novel is that they represent the
eyes of God, staring down at the moral decay of the
1920s. The faded paint of the eyes can be seen as
symbolising the extent to which humanity has lost its
connection to God. This is, however, simply; Nick does
not directly explain the symbol in this way, leaving
the reader to interpret it.
Myrtle’s Dog
• Myrtle decides that she needs a dog. She begs Tom
to buy her a puppy because it will make a cute
addition to her apartment. After Tom buys the dog,
Myrtle thinks nothing of restricting the dog to one
room, with only a cardboard box and a soggy dog
biscuit. Myrtle's lack of concern towards her dog
mirrors her lack of concern towards her husband.
• Myrtle's shallowness is reinforced and increased in
Tom's vicious treatment of her. When Myrtle asks
him shyly if the puppy is a "boy or a girl," Tom
doesn't mince words: "It's a bitch". Tom's label for
Myrtle's dog, "bitch“, summarises the way in which
the narrator describes Myrtle, smouldering with wet
lips, speaking with a coarse voice, pouring out a warm
breath and straining her body at the gas pump with a
"panting vitality"
• Myrtle's dog, metaphorically, not only suggests
Myrtle, it also suggests all who are displaced in this
dark, jazz-age environment, which Nick describes as
the "valley of ashes." During her cocktail party,
Myrtle's dog is stranded on top of the dining room
table: "The little dog was sitting on the table looking
with blind eyes through the smoke, and from time to
time groaning faintly". Similar to T. J. Eckleburg,
whose dim eyes with their "eternal blindness" look
over the "grotesque garden" of ashes, Myrtle's dog
tries to peer, through Myrtle's hell.
• Tom clearly belongs in this environment. When he
strikes Myrtle across the face, he shows his
brutality. After his abuse, Myrtle is left speechless.
Her nose is broken and bleeding: she cowers on the
couch in retreat. This retreat foreshadows her final,
desperate plunge into the road, where she lies killed
in a pool of blood. Tom remarks after her death that
she has been run over "like you'd run over a dog"
Theme - Vision
• The eyes provide a focal point for the books
thematic concern with vision. The board
assumes strong significance at the end of
the novel, when George Wilson mistakes the
eyes for those of an omniscient God.
Fitzgerald seems to suggest that
consumerism and materialism have taken the
place of spiritual values in modern America
and have become pervasive.
Theme – Relationship between
Old and New Worlds
• Nick Carraway is writing his book in the
Midwest, the heart of America, and near the
end he declares it to be a tale of the west.
Fitzgerald wanted ‘The Great Gatsby’ to be a
typically American novel. At the same time
he felt it necessary to show the complicated
relationship of New World ideals to Old
World values. The novel is developed by
Fitzgerald’s ironic treatment of that
relationship.
Theme – Social Status
• The Wilsons live at their place of work. This shows
that they have a lower social standing than Nick
Carraway, who works in the city but lives in a suburb,
some distance from work. The very rich in this novel
seem to not work at all, and can live where they
choose. F. Scott Fitzgerald emphasises that
America, despite claims to democratic equality, is a
society divided into a number of social classes based
on wealth and property.
• We see Myrtle buying various items, but should
recognise that in turn she is being bought by Tom
Buchanan. He buys her gifts, including a dog as a pet,
but Tom views his relationship to Myrtle in material
terms, as a physical affair rather than an emotional
commitment. The relationship stands in direct
contrast to Gatsby’s idealistic devotion to Daisy.
Quotes
• “This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where
ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and
grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of
houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally,
with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly
and already crumbling through the powdery air.
Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an
invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes
to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up
with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud,
which screens their obscure operations from your
sight.”
• “He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York.
He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.”
• “I married him because I thought he was a gentleman...I
thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't
fit to lick my shoe.”
• “He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in, and
never told me about it, and the man came after it one day
when he was out...I gave it to him and then I lay down and
cried...all afternoon.”
• “I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park
through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I
became entangled in some wild, strident argument which
pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high
over the city our line of yellow windows must have
contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual
watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too,
looking up and wondering. I was within and without,
simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the
inexhaustible variety of life.”