Tom shows off Gatsby's car, pretending it's his own. Wilson explains the he's figured out that Myrtle is cheating on him, so he's taking her the way from New York to a different state.
Glad that Wilson hasn't figured out who Myrtle is having the affair with, Tom says that he will sell Wilson his car as he promised.
As they drive off, Nick sees Myrtle in an upstairs window staring at Tom and Jordan, whom she assumes to be his wife. It's still crazy hot when they get to Manhattan. Jordan suggests going to the movies, but they end up getting a suite at the Plaza Hotel. The hotel room is stifling, and they can hear the sounds of a wedding going on downstairs.
The conversation is tense. Tom starts picking at Gatsby, but Daisy defends him. Tom accuses Gatsby of not actually being an Oxford man.
Gatsby explains that he only went to Oxford for a short time because of a special program for officers after the war. This plausible-sounding explanation fills Nick with confidence about Gatsby. Suddenly Gatsby decides to tell Tom his version of the truth—that Daisy never loved Tom but has always only loved Gatsby. Tom calls Gatsby crazy and says that of course Daisy loves him—and that he loves her too even if he does cheat on her all the time.
Gatsby demands that Daisy tell Tom that she has never loved him. This crushes Gatsby. Tom starts revealing what he knows about Gatsby from his investigation. It turns out that Gatsby's money comes from illegal sales of alcohol in drugstores, just as Tom had predicted when he first met him. Tom has a friend who tried to go into business with Gatsby and Wolfshiem. Through him, Tom knows that bootlegging is only part of the criminal activity that Gatsby is involved in.
These revelations cause Daisy to shut down, and no matter how much Gatsby tries to defend himself, she is disillusioned. She asks Tom to take her home. Tom's last power play is to tell Gatsby to take Daisy home instead, knowing that leaving them alone together now does not pose any threat to him or his marriage.
Tom, Nick, and Jordan drive home together in Tom's car. The narration now switches to Nick repeating evidence given at an inquest a legal proceeding to gather facts surrounding a death by Michaelis, who runs a coffee shop next to Wilson's garage. That evening Wilson had explained to Michaelis that he had locked up Myrtle in order to keep an eye on her until they moved away in a couple of days.
Michaelis was shocked to hear this, because usually Wilson was a meek man. When Michaelis left, he heard Myrtle and Wilson fighting. Then Myrtle ran out into the street toward a car coming from New York. The car hit her and drove off, and by the time Michaelis reached her on the ground, she was dead.
The narration switches back to Nick's point of view, as Tom, Nick, and Jordan are driving back from Manhattan. They pull up to the accident site. At first, Tom jokes about Wilson getting some business at last, but when he sees the situation is serious, he stops the car and runs over to Myrtle's body.
Tom asks a policeman for details of the accident. When he realizes that witnesses can identify the yellow car that hit Myrtle, he worries that Wilson, who saw him in that car earlier that afternoon, will finger him to the police. Tom grabs Wilson and tells him that the yellow car that hit Myrtle is not Tom's, and that he was only driving it before giving it back to its owner.
Back at his house, Tom invites Nick and Jordan inside. Nick is sickened by the whole thing and turns to go. Jordan also asks Nick to come inside. When he refuses again, she goes in.
As Nick is walking away, he sees Gatsby lurking in the bushes. Nick suddenly sees him as a criminal. As they discuss what happened, Nick realizes that it was actually Daisy who was driving the car, meaning that it was Daisy who killed Myrtle. Gatsby makes it sound like she had to choose between getting into a head-on collision with another car coming the other way on the road or hitting Myrtle, and at the last second chose to hit Myrtle.
Gatsby seems to have no feelings at all about the dead woman, and instead only worries about what Daisy and how she will react. Gatsby says that he will take the blame for driving the car. Gatsby says that he is lurking in the dark to make sure that Daisy is safe from Tom, who he worries might treat her badly when he finds out what happened. Nick goes back to the house to investigate, and sees Tom and Daisy having an intimate conspiratorial moment together in the kitchen.
It's clear that once again Gatsby has fundamentally misunderstood Tom and Daisy's relationship. Nick leaves Gatsby alone. Then she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch just as a freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room. The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her mother's dress.
Did mother get powder on your old yellowy hair? Stand up now, and say How-de-do. Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand.
Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don't think he had ever really believed in its existence before.
This is our first and only chance to see Daisy performing motherhood. And "performing" is the right word, since everything about Daisy's actions here rings a little false and her cutesy sing song a little bit like an act. The presence of the nurse makes it clear that, like many upper-class women of the time, Daisy does not actually do any child rearing.
At the same time, this is the exact moment when Gatsby is delusional dreams start breaking down. The shock and surprise that he experiences when he realizes that Daisy really does have a daughter with Tom show how little he has thought about the fact the Daisy has had a life of her own outside of him for the last five years.
The existence of the child is proof of Daisy's separate life, and Gatsby simply cannot handle then she is not exactly as he has pictured her to be. Finally, here we can see how Pammy is being bred for her life as a future "beautiful little fool", as Daisy put it. Comparing and contrasting Daisy and Jordan is one of the most common assignments that you will get when studying this novel. This very famous quotation is a great place to start.
Daisy's attempt at a joke reveals her fundamental boredom and restlessness. Despite the fact that she has social standing, wealth, and whatever material possessions she could want, she is not happy in her endlessly monotonous and repetitive life.
This existential ennui goes a long way to helping explain why she seizes on Gatsby as an escape from routine. On the other hand, Jordan is a pragmatic and realistic person, who grabs opportunities and who sees possibilities and even repetitive cyclical moments of change. For example here, although fall and winter are most often linked to sleep and death, whereas it is spring that is usually seen as the season of rebirth, for Jordan any change brings with it the chance for reinvention and new beginnings.
That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl. Nick notes that the way Daisy speaks to Gatsby is enough to reveal their relationship to Tom. Once again we see the powerful attraction of Daisy's voice.
For Nick, this voice is full of "indiscretion," an interesting word that at the same time brings to mind the revelation of secrets and the disclosure of illicit sexual activity.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. Nick describes Gatsby kissing Daisy in Louisville five years before. Over the course of the piece, I gave supportive quotes from the book and explanations to back up my reasoning why Gatsby is obsessed with Daisy, and included a counter argument.
Tom refuses to let Nick relay the information to Daisy. The American Dream Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby are lovers in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby follows Jay Gatsby, a man who orders his life around one desire: to be reunited with Daisy Buchanan, the love he lost five years earlier. Tom can see in Daisy's eyes that Daisy and Gatsby … 2. In this chapter, she kisses Gatsby on the mouth and tells him that she loves him, yet she won't give up the life she has with Tom to be with Gatsby.
There are so many figures of speech that Nick uses after he says that Gatsby kissed Daisy. Daisy and Tom have moved away, leaving no forwarding address. Gatsby and Nick strike up a friendship.
It is difficult to say exactly what Gatsby wants to recover-perhaps innocence, an integrity of his dream which, because it now rests with Daisy, is in danger of being destroyed. Get your answers by asking now. What is Gatsby giving up when he kisses Daisy? In fact, several characters are based on people Fitzgerald encountered, from a famous bootlegger to his own ex-girlfriend.
The characters of F. All that Gatsby possessed was only and exclusively to show Daisy he could give her the life she wanted. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website.
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Necessary Necessary. While this happened briefly in Chapter 6, here the two men take each other on, head-to-head. Tom can no longer deny that Gatsby and Daisy are having an affair specifics about that affair are, however, sketchy. The only item of significance is that the affair is an extension of Gatsby's dream and it leads him to the destruction of the dream and of himself. Within hours of learning of his wife's indiscretions, Tom learns that in addition to perhaps losing his wife, he is most certainly losing his mistress.
This double loss enrages Tom and he strikes violently at the man he perceives as being responsible — a man who is, in his eyes, a low-class hustler, a bootlegger who will never be able to distance himself from his past. In Tom's elitist mind, Gatsby is common and therefore his existence is meaningless: He comes from ordinary roots and can never change that. By chapter's end, Gatsby has been fully exposed.
Gone are the mysterious rumors and the self-made myth. Stripped of all his illusions, he stands outside Daisy's house, vulnerable and tragically alone. Although he begins the chapter with his customary Gatsby dignity, when he comes up against Tom's hardness, the illusion of Jay Gatsby comes tumbling down. In all of Gatsby's years of dreaming, he never once suspected that he might not have his way as is the nature of dreaming; one never dreams of having people stand in the way, preventing fantasies from coming true.
As soon as Gatsby has to contend with people whose parts he can't script, he's at a loss. Instead, he will try, at all costs, to hold on to his dream. It is, in a sense, the only thing that is real to him. Without it sadly , he is no longer able to define himself; therefore, the dream must be maintained at all costs even when the dream has passed its prime.
The best example of Gatsby's last-chance efforts to save his dream come after he tries to get Daisy to admit she never loved Tom. When she admits to having actually loved Tom, Gatsby, unwilling to give up, pushes the situation forward, abruptly telling Tom "Daisy's leaving you. By following Tom's command, the lovers, in effect, admit defeat and Gatsby's dream disintegrates. In addition to getting the real scoop on Gatsby, one also sees the real Daisy. She has relatively few lines, but what she utters, and later what she does, changes her persona forever.
Whereas in the previous chapters she has come off as shy and sweet, a little vapid, but decidedly charming, here, there is a bit more depth to her — but what lies beneath the surface isn't necessarily good. Daisy's reasons for having an affair with Gatsby aren't at all the same reasons he is in love with her. By boldly kissing Gatsby when Tom leaves the room early in Chapter 7, then declaring "You know I love you" loudly enough for all to hear much to Jordan and Nick's discomfiture Daisy has, in effect, shown that to her, loving Gatsby is a game whose sole purpose is to try and get back at Tom.
She's playing the game on her own terms, trying to prove something to her husband her response to Tom's rough questioning later at the hotel also supports this idea. The other early vision of Daisy is of the peacekeeper although one wonders why she would want Tom and Gatsby both at the same outing.
On the hot summer day, it is Daisy who suggests they move the party to town largely in an attempt to keep everyone happy. Strange things, however, always happen in the city — in the land of infinite possibilities. By changing the location, the action also shifts.
As the chapter continues and the party moves to the neutral, yet magical, land of the city, the real Daisy begins to emerge, culminating in her fateful refusal to be part of Gatsby's vision. In a sense, she betrays him, leaving him to flounder helplessly against Tom's spite and anger. Finally, by the end of the chapter, the mask of innocence has come off and Daisy is exposed. Her recklessness has resulted in Myrtle's brutal death. To make matters worse, one even senses that Daisy, in fact, tried to kill Myrtle.
Gatsby has a hard time admitting that the object of his love has, in fact, not merely hit and killed another person, but has fled the scene as well. Myrtle's death by Gatsby's great car is certainly no accident. The details are sketchy, but in having Myrtle run down by Gatsby's roadster, Fitzgerald is sending a clear message.
Gatsby's car, the "death car," assumes a symbolic significance as a clear and obvious manifestation of American materialism. What more obvious way to put one's wealth and means on display than through the biggest, fanciest car around. Yes, it is tragic that Myrtle dies so brutally, but her death takes on greater meaning when one realizes that it is materialism that brought about her end.
Looking back to Chapter 2, it is clear that Myrtle aspires to wealth and privilege. She wants all the material comforts money can provide — and isn't at all above lording her wealth over others such as her sister, or Nick, or the McKees.
Her desire for money which allows access to all things material led her to have an affair with Tom she got involved with him initially because of the fashionable way he was dressed.
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