Chapter 7
• Nick and Gatsby visit the Buchanan’s, where
Jordan is also a guest, and meet Daisy’s
daughter.
• En route to the city, the group stops at George
Wilson’s garage and Wilson discloses that his
wife and he are planning to go West.
• The group takes a room at the Plaza hotel,
where Tom and Gatsby argue about which of
them Daisy loves
• Myrtle Wilson is killed by a hit-and-run driver.
• Gatsby reveals to Nick that Daisy was driving
the vehicle, but announces his intention to
take the blame.
• There have been changes of staff at Gatsby’s
house, apparently to ensure discretion
concerning Daisy’s visits. On the hottest day of
the summer, Nick takes up an invitation to visit
the Buchanans, where Jordan is also a guest. A
nurse brings Daisy’s daughter, Pammy, to meet
Nick and Gatsby. Daisy suggests that the adults
should go to town. She discloses her love for
Gatsby through her manner, her “indiscrete
voice”, but also tells him that he resembles in his
coolness a certain advertisement. Gatsby notes
that her voice is “full of money”.
Paranoia
• The longest chapter
• Now that Gatsby has what he wants he is
desperate to protect it
• His paranoia is communicated to his new
butler
• Nick puts it down to Daisy’s disapproval
• They are all connected to Wolfshiem- the
criminal world of New York has come to East
Egg
Setting
• The heat makes things uncomfortable and
brings people’s emotions to the fore
• Page 121: “every extra gesture was an
affront to the common store of life”
• Daisy herself seems to blame the fact that
“it’s so hot” for the fact that “everything’s
confused”.
Nick Carraway
• Nick remembers that it is his 30th birthday, and considers his own
prospects to be bleak.
• Nick’s recollection that it is his 30th birthday provides an insight
into a melancholy side of this character:”Thirty- the promise of a
decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a
thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair”. F. Scott
Fitzgerald suggested, with a degree of seriousness, that life goes
downhill once you have reached the age of 15. He was keenly
aware that the intensity of youthful expectations and admirations,
the largely undefined sense of hope one has in childhood, can be
eroded steadily by accumulated experience and steady
disappointment. Jay Gatsby, we are told, is the adolescent
creation of James Gatz, and that youthful outlook, not jaded by
the responsibilities and obligations of adulthood despite the
intervening years and experience of war, remains Gatsby’s
distinguishing characteristic.
• Nick’s dismal vision of diminishing potential
contrasts markedly with his earlier statement
of appreciation for Gatsby’s “heightened
sensitivity to the promises of life”. His sense
of his own mortality, an irreversible
movement towards his own death: “So we
drove on toward death through the cooling
twilight”.
Daisy Buchanan
• After the image of the nurturing maternal
breast noted in the last chapter, Daisy’s
inadequacies as a mother are especially
striking. Her daughter, Pammy, is displayed
like one more possession in a household
wealthy enough to employ a nurse, along with
numerous other servants.
Tom
• Tom notices Daisy’s feelings and acts
aggressively towards Gatsby
• “eyes still flashing”, “trembling with effort”
(page 125)
• He is only able to criticise Gatsby for trivial
things:
• “He wears a pink suit” (page 128)
• “Oxford, New Mexico”
• He “feels the hot whips of panic” (p131)
Mr Wilson
• Mr Wilson feels the need to “get her away”
• He has realised that Myrtle is having an affair
• Nick notes that Wilson and Tom are in a similar
situation: “there was no difference between
men”
• Even Tom seems to feel sympathy and gives
him the car
The Affair
• They stop for petrol at George Wilson’s garage.
Wilson says that he is unwell and that he and
myrtle are planning to go West. Tom is startled
by this news. Wilson has recognisesd that his
wife has been having an affair, although he seems
unaware that Tom is involved. Nick notices
Myrtle looking from a window. He reads in her
face jealousy at the sight of Jordan, whom she
takes to be Tom’s wife. Tom feels both his wife
and his mistress are slipping away from him.
The Plaza
• Tom, Nick, Daisy, Jordan and Gatsby take a room in the glamorous and
exclusive Plaza Hotel. Amid tense banter the sound of the Wedding March
is heard, recalling to Daisy her marriage in Louisville, Kentucky, in June,
some years before. Gatsby, challenged by Tom, explains that he spent five
months in Oxford in 1919, as part of a special arrangement made for
members of the American Armed Forces in Europe. Tom, deploring
Gatsby’s advances to Daisy, calls him ”Mr Nobody from Nowhere”. Things
come to a head with Gatsby declaring that Daisy loves him rather than her
husband, and claiming that it was because he was poor that they did not
marry.
• After denying her love for Tom, Daisy eventually admits that she has loved
him in the past. It becomes clear that the past five years, since Tom
intervened between the youthful lovers, cannot simply be erased. Gatsby
still insists Daisy is leaving Tom for him. Then tom suggests that Gatsby has
made money from bootlegging in association with Wolfshiem. Following
that it is clear that Gatsby has lost Daisy irretrievably, this is a critical turning
point in his life.
Theme - class
• Tom drives Nick and Jordan to town in Gatsby’s car and
discloses that he has been investigating Gatsby’s past.
He denies that Gatsby actually attended Oxford
University. Jordan accuses Tom of snobbery.
• The class distinction between the wealthy and their
employees is subsequently invoked by tom in order to
assert his superiority over Gatsby, and to emphasise
Gatsby’s unsuitability as a suitor to Daisy. He says “I’ll
be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her
unless you brought groceries to the back door”.
Narrative Voice
• The narrative shifts to a character called Michaelis, who is introduced as
“the principle witness at the inquest”. F. Scott Fitzgerald may have derived
the name, Michaelis, from Joseph Conrad’s novel ‘The Secret Agent’, where
it belongs to a grotesquely fat anarchist. The novel’s pivotal event has
occurred. Wilson and Myrtle had an argument. In her anger, distracted,
Myrtle rushed into the street and was fatally injured by a car. The car did
not stop. Nick gives an account of his own arrival at the scene, with Tom
driving. A bystander testifies that the “death car” was a big yellow vehicle.
• The narrative cuts to the Buchanans’ home where Nick meets Gatsby in the
garden. Gatsby reveals that Daisy was driving the car that killed Myrtle, but
says that he intends to take the blame. It seems that Myrtle mistakenly
thought Tom was at the wheel of the yellow car. Nick returns to the house
and finds Tom and Daisy sharing “an unmistakable air of natural intimacy”.
They appear to be hatching a conspiracy. Nick leaves Gatsby at his
customary vigil, fixated on the green electric light at the end of Daisy’s dock,
“watching over nothing”.
Structure
• The party at the Plaza Hotel forms a structural
echo of the drinking session at Myrtle’s
apartment in Chapter 2. These small parties are
interspersed with the larger affairs organised by
Gatsby, and effectively provide a close up
sequence, or narrowing of focus from more
panoramic events on West Egg. In these set
pieces, F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates his skill in
creating dynamic exchanges in dialogue, using
speech to advance the action and to deepen our
understanding of the characters and their
motivation.
Symbol - Cars
• The automobile, embodiment of freedom of
movement and symbol of social as well as
physical mobility, has become an instrument of
death and mutilation as it does in other American
novels of the time, such as Theodore Dreiser’s An
American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer
Gantry. The singularity of Gatsby’s vehicle, its
conspicuousness, makes tracing the culprit easy,
and with a little assistance from Tom Buchanan,
George Wilson soon finds his way to the Gatsby
mansion