Fitzgerald's Challenge (to Nick's Perception of Gatsby)

[Monty J]

Following Gatsby's death and funeral, Fitzgerald imbeded a bold invitation to readers (Chapter IX, p.179) to find a different perception of Myrtle's death than Nick's: [Nick, narrates]

One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own. I didn't want to hear it, and I avoided him when I got off the train.

Nick's closed-mindedness to seeing Gatsby from a different perspective is more evidence of his emotional investment in Gatsby.

Through his rearview mirror, the taxi driver had observed in the intimate quarters of his back seat, Gatsby escorting a "nervous" married rich woman home from his mansion less than a half hour after the accident. Why did Gatsby call a taxi instead of driving his own car? Because it matched the description of the yellow "death car" and showed damage from the collision with Myrtle, of course.

This very same taxi driver could easily have been familiar with Gatsby's flashy yellow Rolls from earlier in the summer, when it met droves of people at the train station, ferrying them to the Gatsby's fairland galas.

The purposed served by this extraneous passage is an invitation to readers to ponder what kind of story this taxi driver might make about that night, an alternate story, that Nick didn't want to hear.

This passage is a portal to another perspective beyond Nick's inflated conception of Jay Gatsby, enabling us, after being trapped for the entire novel inside Nick's head, to step back and consider Gatsby bathed in the glow of unbiased reason.