The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.

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.

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.

in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.

small Lutheran College of St. Olaf’s in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through.

the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man.

He walked around the room quickly, ringing bells. “I’ll have something to drink for you in just a minute.”

the woman said nothing either—until unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.

I’d enjoyed these same people only two weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now.

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. “And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for hours—”

wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!” He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”

His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was…

So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion;

so far his suspicions hadn’t alighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before—and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty—as if he had just got some poor girl with child.

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

“You’re not going to take care of her any more.” “I’m not?” Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to control himself now. “Why’s that?” “Daisy’s leaving you.” “Nonsense.” “I am, though,” she said with a visible effort. “She’s not leaving me!” Tom’s words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. “Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger.” “I won’t stand this!” cried Daisy. “Oh, please let’s get out.”

That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby’s face.

only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room. The voice begged again to go. “Please, Tom! I can’t stand this any more.” Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were definitely gone. “You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr. Gatsby’s car.”

Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.

Generally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn’t working, he sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road. When anyone spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable, colourless way. He was his wife’s man and not his own.

I’d be damned if I’d go in; I’d had enough of all of them for one day, and suddenly that included Jordan too.

There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

sleep.” He shook his head. “I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport.” He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.

He wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free.

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same strata as herself—that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities—he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.

He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.

Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”

fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.

all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.

“Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were first married—and loved me more even then, do you see?” Suddenly he came out with a curious remark. “In any case,” he said, “it was just personal.” What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn’t be measured?

his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

it was going away from the sun, which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath.

He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around. “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.

Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool, as if a divot from a green golf-links had come sailing in at the office window, but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.

Myrtle Wilson’s tragic achievement was forgotten.

He believed that Mrs. Wilson had been running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any particular car.

Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ash-heaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.

Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn’t to be taken out under any circumstances—and this was strange, because the front right fender needed repair.

he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water.

the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.

So Wilson was reduced to a man “deranged by grief” in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there.

But, though they drew back the sheet and looked at Gatsby with shocked eyes, his protest continued in my brain: “Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone.”

I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all.