Quote
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I
forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested,
and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the
fundamental decencies is parceled out
unequally at birth. (1.3)
When I came back from the East last autumn I
felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and
at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no
more riotous excursions with privileged
glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby,
the man who gives his name to this book, was
exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who
represented everything for which I have an
unaffected scorn. (1.4)
I lived at West Egg, the – well, the least
fashionable of the two, though this is a most
superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a
little sinister contrast between them. My house
was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards
from the Sound, and squeezed between two
huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen
thousand a season. The one on my right was a
colossal affair by any standard … My own
house was an eyesore, but it was a small
eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had
a view of the water, a partial view of my
neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of
millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
(1.14)
There was music from my neighbor's house
through the summer nights. In his blue gardens
men and girls came and went like moths
among the whisperings and he champagne
and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I
watched his guests diving from the tower of his
raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his
beach while his motor-boats slid the waters of
the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts
of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce
became an omnibus, bearing parties to and
Analysis
Here, Nick says that money isn't the only thing
that some people are born to. Some people are
naturally just nicer and more honest: they have
more "sense of the fundamental decencies."
But does Nick believe that poor people can be
born with these fundamental decencies, too, or
do you have to be rich to have natural class?
Gatsby may be low-class, but Nick still
manages to see something good in him,
anyway. Maybe he has the "natural decencies"
that other members of high society don't.
Except, we think this might be a little like the,
"but I have a lot of ______ friends" excuse to
make someone not sound racist or
xenophobic.)
Theme/Significance
Character of Nick
Theme of Society/Class
It may be a small house, but at least Nick gets
to live near millionaires. He's joking, but this is
the same logic that makes people buy designer
sunglasses: you may not be able to afford the
actual clothes, but you still get to have a little
reflected glamour. Hey, no judgment here.
Character of Nick
Theme of Society/Class
Okay, so the parties sound fabulous. These
people are definitely partying like it's 1999, or
whatever. But what we're really into is that Nick
actually notices the servants—the people who
end up cleaning up the mess. Remember that
Nick has to clean up after Daisy and Tom.
Maybe he identifies a little bit with the servants.
Character of Nick
Theme of Society/Class
Character of Nick
Theme of Society/Class
from the city between nine in the morning and
long past midnight, while his station wagon
scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all
trains. And on Mondays eight servants,
including an extra gardener, toiled all day with
mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers
and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of
the night before. (3.1)
By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as
ever. She had a debut after the Armistice, and
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, and hired a whole floor of
the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the
wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued
at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
(4.135)
We shook hands and I started away. Just
before I reached the hedge I remembered
something and turned around.
Money might not make you happy, but there's
some consolation in a $350K string of pearls. If
you have to be depressed, you might as well
be depressed on a yacht, right?
Character of Nick
Character of Daisy
Theme of Society/Class
Check out that use of the word "worth." Daisy
and Tom may have been born with money, but
they're not "worth" anything. But Gatsby—
despite his ill-gotten money—is.
Character of Nick
Character of Gatsby
Theme of Society/Class
"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the
lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put
together." (8.44-45)
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one . . . just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've
had." Chapter 1
"…what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded
elations of men." Chapter 1
"I hope she'll be a fool — that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool . . . You see, I think everything's terrible
anyhow . . . And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Chapter 1
"Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the
end of a dock." Chapter 1
"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." Chapter 2
"He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive." Chapter 2
"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." Chapter 2
"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." Chapter 2
"I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not
invited — they went there." Chapter 3
"I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library." Chapter 3
"I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and
life." Chapter 3
"It takes two to make an accident." Chapter 3
“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced,
or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It
understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.” Chapter 3
"Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever
known." Chapter 3
"I belong to another generation . . . As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won't impose myself on you any longer." Chapter 4
"'A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: 'There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.'"
Chapter 4
"Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into
my eyes." Chapter 5
"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry." Chapter 5
"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the
end of your dock." Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to
him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from
Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light
on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. (5.121-122)
"His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth
was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God . . . and he must be
about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a
seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end." Chapter 6
"Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the
fans." Chapter 7
"I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of
funny fruits were going to fall into your hands." Chapter 7
"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight." Chapter 7
"It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy — it increased her value in his eyes." Chapter 8
"When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different . . . I stuck
with them to the end . . . Let us learn to show friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead." Chapter 9
"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of
me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride."
"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor." (9.134-35)
"After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction." Chapter 9
“That’s my Middle West . . . the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark. . . . I see now that this has been a story of the West,
after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which
made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” Chapter 9
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their
vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Chapter 9
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that
flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.... And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I
thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out Daisy's light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn,
and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him,
somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Chapter 9
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter —
tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . . And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne
back ceaselessly into the past." Chapter 9