The Great Gatsby
Chapter Five
Learning Intentions
• Understand the importance of rain in this
chapter and how it is a metaphor for
emotional release
• Think about the relationship between
Daisy and Gatsby and how this is
portrayed by Fitzgerald
• Identify Gatsby’s anti-climactic feelings
towards Daisy
Chapter Summary
• Nick organises a meeting at his house between
Gatsby and Daisy
• Alone with Nick, Gatsby discloses that the
money which bought his mansion was made in
just three years
• Gatsby gives them a guided tour of his house,
displaying his possessions, especially his
expensive, imported clothes
• Nick muses on the nature of Gatsby's desire for
this woman, and remarks on the intensity of their
relationship, eventually he leaves them alone
Gatsby’s Blazing House
• Perhaps he wishes his house to be a beacon of light to
Daisy, in the same way that her green dock light is a
source of spiritual satisfaction to him.
• He seems like a man who is afraid of the dark – or of the
ghostliness that comes from an empty house.
• For Gatsby, the ‘show’ of his home must go on to face off
the darkness troubling him.
• His life is essentially empty – notice how he talks about
‘glancing into some of the rooms’ in his house, as if
checking to see that everything is ‘perfect’.
• His home is a showpiece, an emblem of spiritual death.
Rain and Gatsby's Relationship
with Daisy
• At 4pm, when Daisy arrives, the rain has ‘cooled to a
damp mist’. The connections of ‘cool’ and ‘damp’ to
Daisy’s character are clear from the previous chapter,
where we learned that her feelings for Gatsby faded as
his letter became a damp pulp.
• At the height of Gatsby’s discomfort – when Nick finds
the tensions too unbearable to remain indoors – it is
again ‘pouring’.
• When Nick returns, Daisy and Gatsby have happily
reacquainted. Significantly, ‘the sun shone again’, there
are ‘twinkle bells of sunshine in the room’ and Gatsby
is again ‘an ecstatic patron of recurring light’.
Rain and Gatsby's Relationship
with Daisy
• As Gatsby falls into an anti-climax, Daisy
begins to cry. The introduction of the
symbol of Gatsby’s shirts is very important
here. Daisy breaks down at the sight of
Gatsby throwing – almost obsessively –
his shirts onto his bed.
Rain and Gatsby's Relationship
with Daisy
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing
them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer
linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost
their folds as they fell and covered the table in a
many-coloured disarray. While we admired he
brought more and the soft rich heap mounted
higher – shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids
in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint
orange, with monograms of Indian blue.
Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her
head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
Rain and Gatsby's Relationship
with Daisy
• Daisy’s moment of release – when the ‘soft rich heap’
dumbfounds her – occurs at a moment of simultaneous
wonder and disappointment. Gatsby is, by now, ‘running
down like an over wound clock’, a result of having
spent so many years obsessing over Daisy ‘at an
inconceivable pitch of intensity’. His rather bewildered
sense of sadness and anti-climax combines with Daisy’s
sense of wonder and awe at the spectacle of social
status laid out before her. Like the time she was dogchained by Tom's status symbol (the pearls) she reacts
to Gatsby's shirts with tears. The curious mixture of
happiness and tears (sunshine and rain) provides a
rainbow – depicted by the multicoloured array of shirts
on the bed.
Gatsby's Relationship with
Daisy
• The episode in which Gatsby and Daisy are reunited in
his mansion is clearly a highly significant one. It is an
encounter that carries an enormous amount of weight in
the novel and, discloses to us that Daisy falls terribly
short of the ideal version lodged in Gatsby's heart and
imagination.
• It might seem obvious that Gatsby and Daisy have a lot
of catching up to do, and would feel the need to talk at
length, yet dialogue is kept to a minimum. Their feelings
for one and other are communicated through their
actions and through what remains unsaid.
Gatsby’s Anti-Climax
• We get the feeling in this chapter that, despite Gatsby’s
sense of wonder and awe at Daisy's presence, he
nonetheless experiences an unusual sense of emptiness
and disappointment.
• Nick makes particular reference to the light at the end of
Daisy's dock, the ‘colossal significance’, of which, ‘has
now vanished forever’.
• For Gatsby, that light had been a tantalising, spiritual
beacon to light his way to Daisy, now that he is within his
grasp, it has reverted back to the ordinary.
Gatsby’s Anti-Climax
Gatsby seems to revel in the electric intensity of reaching for an object
more than grasping it:
I saw that the faint expression of bewilderment had come back into
Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the
quality of his present happiness. Five years! There just have been
moments even on that afternoon when Daisy stumbled short of his
dreams – not through her fault, but because of the colossal vitality of
his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. …No
amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up
in his ghostly heart.
The trajectory of Gatsby's dream is such that the object of that dream –
Daisy – falls short. This is part of Gatsby's tragedy – pursuing a
dream that he, himself, has made unattainable.
The Clock
• Gatsby himself is referred to as an ‘over wound clock’ in this
chapter, which ties him perceptibly to the idea of the passing of time.
When he enters Nick’s house, he behaves very like a wooden stiff
actor, full of unrealistic gesture and poses
‘in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease… his head leaned back so far
that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock, and
from this position his distraught eyes stared down..’
The deliberate use of negative adjectives to describe these clocks –
‘defunct’ and ‘over wound’ – reinforce the idea that Gatsby has a
skewed and unrealistic idea of time itself. For him, time must have
stopped and rewound to the point where he lost Daisy to Tom
Buchanan.