Chapter 6
Summary
• Nick reveals more about Gatsby’s past, his
humble origins and his time with Dan Cody.
• The Buchanans attend one of Gatsby’s parties,
and the growing tension between Tom and
Gatsby is obvious.
• Nick has not seen his neighbor in several
weeks because Gatsby is devoting his time to
Daisy, and Nick has been involved with Jordan.
• As a result, Nick decides to go over and check
on Gatsby one Sunday afternoon.
• He has not been in Gatsby's mansion for two
minutes when a party of three horseback
riders stops for a drink.
The Party
• Daisy and Gatsby danced.
• I remember being surprised by his graceful,
conservative fox-trot - I had never
seen him dance before.
• Then they went to Nick’s house and sat on the
steps for half an hour.
• Nick “remained watchfully in
the garden. “In case there's
a fire or a flood,” she
explained, “or any
act of God.”
The Party Continues
• Daisy tries to be excited about the party-goers
and involved in the festivities, but everything
about the party offends her. The women are
inebriated and acting poorly, and Tom is
chasing a girl who is “common but pretty.”
• Gatsby introduces Tom as the polo player….
• And Tom does not like it.
After the Party
• Gatsby asks Nick to stay after the other guests
have left.
• Nick immediately notices that his neighbor's
eyes look tired and that his face is drawn tight.
• He is the picture of misery.
• Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy did not enjoy the
party, that she does not understand him, and
that he feels far away from her.
Jay Gatsby
• His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people
from North Dakota.
• Even as a boy, he dreamed of a better life.
• At age sixteen, he set off to make his own way as a
clam digger and salmon fisherman on the shore of Lake
Superior.
• Nick introduces more details to form a picture of
Gatsby’s past. His original name was James Gatz which
he changed when he was seventeen to the more
glamorous Jay Gatsby. He came from North Dakota, a
state on the border with Canada and situated midway
between the East and West Coasts of America.
• His real break with the past came when Dan Cody
moored his yacht in the shallows of Lake Superior, and
Gatz warned him of possible danger from high wind. It
was at this point that the new name came into being,
to match the beauty and glamour which Cody’s yacht
represented to him. Gatsby was rewarded with an
education in the ways of the world from this
opportunist millionaire, ‘a product of the Nevada
silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal
since seventy-five’.
• Nick discusses the act of self-creation that
produced the man he calls ‘The Great Gatsby’.
This idealistic act contrasts the insistent greed
of Cody, who yet became Gatsby’s ‘destiny’.
During his five years as Cody’s assistant,
Gatsby sailed three times around the
American continent. Then Cody died.
Gatsby’s inheritance was not the twenty five
thousand dollars Cody intended he should
inherit but a “singularly appropriate
education”. Nick believes this to be the truth.
Dan Cody
• Dan Cody was fifty years old
• Worth millions due to his Montana copper
mining venture.
• With vast wealth and no purpose, he became
a drifter, drinker, and womanizer, sometimes
prone to violence.
Ella Kaye
• Ella Kaye was newspaper woman involved
with Dan Cody.
• Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston
and a week later Dan Cody died.
Inheritance Lost
•
•
•
•
And it was from Cody that he inherited money
A legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars.
He didn't get it.
He never understood the legal device that was
used against him, but what remained of the
millions went intact to Ella Kaye.
Tom Buchanan
• He then reports an occasion when Tom was
brought as a guest to Gatsby’s mansion.
Gatsby told Tom that he knew his wife. Tom’s
response was to make the edgy remark: “I
may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but
women run around too much these days to
suit me”. This suggests Tom’s view of women
as being objects .
Theme – Relationship of Past with
Present
• Gatsby wants Daisy to leave her husband for him
and to tell Tom that she never loved him. Nick
warns, “You can’t repeat the past”; but Gatsby
replies, “Why of course you can!” showing an
ability to fool himself matching his endless capacity
for hope. Jay Gatsby’s ideal future is the return of a
golden moment from his past, rather than
something truly new and unprecedented. Compare
the claims made by early American settlers that
their new world offered the opportunity to return
to the Garden of Eden. The tradition itself goes
back a long way.
Theme – perception v. Reality
• F. Scott Fitzgerald here picks up the concern with capacity for wonder
introduced in the previous chapter. Here he makes explicit the childlike
quality of innocent vision which must accompany it. In Gatsby’s eyes the
city streets become trees, transformed into a green world by means of
imagination and intense feeling. Gatsby feels he can climb those trees,
and at their top he can “suck on the pap of life and gulp down the
incomparable milk of wonder”.
• The nurturing breast that is figured here as “the pap of life” is echoed at
the end of the book in the image of the “fresh green breast of the new
world”. In between these moments of vision, one of Myrtle Wilson’s
breasts is mutilated in an automobile accident. F. Scott Fitzgerald
contrasts the capacity of metaphor to create a visionary reality with a
brutal physical reality that constantly threatens to undermine the power
of the vision. The possibility of sustaining a vision that might redeem the
world from cruelty and suffering is a major concern in narrative.
Gatsby’s Dream
• He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she
should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.”
• After she had obliterated four years with that
sentence they could decide upon the more
practical measures to be taken.
• One of them was that, after she was free, they
were to go back to Louisville and be married
from her house –
• just as if it were five years ago.
Magic and illusion
• Gatsby has transformed himself from a humble
Midwestern boy to an East Coast celebrity. He
has also transformed Daisy Fay, within his own
imagination, from a Southern girl to an ideal
radiant life and beauty. The novel is packed with
references to magic and to enchantment, and, at
least within the confines of his own mind, ‘The
Great Gatsby’ is an accomplished magician. The
phase ‘The Great Gatsby’ carries a suggestion of
the showmanship of stage magicians, who
practise an art of illusion and use such names to
advertise their performances.
• Dan Cody, Gatsby’s mentor, transformed himself into a
millionaire, but underneath the veneer of material success he
remained “the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of
American life brought back to the eastern seaboard the
savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloons”. F. Scott
Fitzgerald is here deflating an idealised version of pioneer life,
characterised by heroism and high mindedness. Just as
Gatsby casts his world in a romantic light, so America has
imagined its Western past in elevated terms. That illusion is
dispelled with the honest look at Cody. The satirist Mark
Twain had earlier produced a much fuller deflation of the
prospecting life of the American West in Roughing It, a work
which F. Scott Fitzgerald knew well. There is ambivalence in F.
Scott Fitzgerald's attitude towards imagination: it can be seen
to work magic and make ordinary life seem enchanted; or it
can be seen to generate illusions that keep harsh realities out
of focus and help perpetuate injustices
Theme – social class
• Gatsby asks the three visitors to stay for dinner.
• The female rider suggests, out of politeness, that
Gatsby come to supper with them.
• Gatsby does not realise that she doesn’t mean it,
and he goes off to change for the dinner party.
• Tom remarks, “My God, I believe the man's
coming. Doesn't he know she doesn't want
him?”
• Tom immediately recognises Gatsby's lack of class
and wonders how in the world Daisy knows him.
• When Gatsby returns downstairs, he discovers he
has been left behind.