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The Great Gatsby 4
The Great Gatsby 4
At two o’clock in the morning, as husbands and wives argue over whether
to leave, a butler tells Jordan that Gatsby would like to see her. Jordan
emerges from her meeting with Gatsby saying that she has just heard
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Nick then proceeds to describe his everyday life, to prove that he does more
with his time than simply attend parties. He works in New York City,
through which he also takes long walks, and he meets women. After a brief
relationship with a girl from Jersey City, Nick follows the advice
of Daisy and Tom and begins seeing Jordan Baker. Nick says that Jordan
is fundamentally a dishonest person; he even knows that she cheated in her
first golf tournament. Nick feels attracted to her despite her dishonesty,
even though he himself claims to be one of the few honest people he has
ever known.
“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.”
At the beginning of this chapter, Gatsby’s party brings 1920s wealth and
glamour into full focus, showing the upper class at its most lavishly
opulent. The rich, both socialites from East Egg and their coarser
counterparts from West Egg, cavort without restraint. As his depiction of
the differences between East Egg and West Egg evidences, Fitzgerald is
fascinated with the social hierarchy and mood of America in the 1920s,
when a large group of industrialists, speculators, and businessmen with
brand-new fortunes joined the old, aristocratic families at the top of the
economic ladder. The “new rich” lack the refinement, manners, and taste
of the “old rich” but long to break into the polite society of the East Eggers.
In this scenario, Gatsby is again an enigma—though he lives in a garishly
ostentatious West Egg mansion, East Eggers freely attend his parties.
Despite the tensions between the two groups, the blend of East and West
Egg creates a distinctly American mood. While the Americans at the party
possess a rough vitality, the Englishmen there are set off dramatically,
seeming desperate and predatory, hoping to make connections that will
make them rich.
3
Many aspects of Gatsby’s world are intriguing because they are slightly
amiss—for instance, he seems to throw parties at which he knows none of
his guests. His accent seems affected, and his habit of calling people “old
sport” is hard to place. One of his guests, Owl Eyes, is surprised to find
that his books are real and not just empty covers designed to create the
appearance of a great library. The tone of Nick’s narration suggests that
many of the inhabitants of East Egg and West Egg use an outward show of
opulence to cover up their inner corruption and moral decay, but Gatsby
seems to use his opulence to mask something entirely different and perhaps
more profound. From this chapter forward, the mystery of Jay
Gatsbybecomes the motivating question of the book, and the unraveling of
Gatsby’s character becomes one of its central mechanisms. One early clue
to Gatsby’s character in this chapter is his mysterious conversation with
Jordan Baker. Though Nick does not know what Gatsby says to her, the
fact that Jordan now knows something “remarkable” about Gatsby means
that a part of the solution to the enigma of Gatsby is now loose among
Nick’s circle of acquaintances.
Chapter 3 also focuses on the gap between perception and reality. At the
party, as he looks through Gatsby’s books, Owl Eyes states that Gatsby has
4
Nick’s description of his life in New York likewise calls attention to the
difference between substance and appearance, as it emphasizes both the
colorful allure of the city and its dangerous lack of balance: he says that
the city has an “adventurous feel,” but he also calls it “racy,” a word with
negative moral connotations. Nick feels similarly conflicted about Jordan.
He realizes that she is dishonest, selfish, and cynical, but he is attracted to
her vitality nevertheless. Their budding relationship emphasizes the extent
to which Nick becomes acclimated to life in the East, abandoning his
Midwestern values and concerns in order to take advantage of the
excitement of his new surroundings.
Chapter 4
Nick lists all of the people who attended Gatsby’s parties that summer, a
roll call of the nation’s most wealthy and powerful people. He then
describes a trip that he took to New York with Gatsby to eat lunch. As they
drive to the city, Gatsby tells Nick about his past, but his story seems highly
improbable. He claims, for instance, to be the son of wealthy, deceased
parents from the Midwest. When Nick asks which Midwestern city he is
from, Gatsby replies, “San Francisco.” Gatsby then lists a long and
preposterously detailed set of accomplishments: he claims to have been
educated at Oxford, to have collected jewels in the capitals of Europe, to
have hunted big game, and to have been awarded medals in World War I
by multiple European countries. Seeing Nick’s skepticism, Gatsby
produces a medal from Montenegro and a picture of himself playing cricket
at Oxford.
5
Gatsby’s car speeds through the valley of ashes and enters the city. When
a policeman pulls Gatsby over for speeding, Gatsby shows him a white
card and the policeman apologizes for bothering him. In the city, Gatsby
takes Nick to lunch and introduces him to Meyer Wolfshiem, who, he
claims, was responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series. Wolfshiem is a
shady character with underground business connections. He gives Nick the
impression that the source of Gatsby’s wealth might be unsavory, and that
Gatsby may even have ties to the sort of organized crime with which
Wolfshiem is associated.
After the lunch in New York, Nick sees Jordan Baker, who finally tells him
the details of her mysterious conversation with Gatsby at the party. She
relates that Gatsby told her that he is in love with Daisy Buchanan.
According to Jordan, during the war, before Daisy married Tom, she was
a beautiful young girl in Louisville, Kentucky, and all the military officers
in town were in love with her. Daisy fell in love with Lieutenant Jay
Gatsby, who was stationed at the base near her home. Though she chose to
marry Tom after Gatsby left for the war, Daisy drank herself into numbness
the night before her wedding, after she received a letter from Gatsby. Daisy
has apparently remained faithful to her husband throughout their marriage,
but Tom has not. Jordan adds that Gatsby bought his mansion in West Egg
solely to be near Daisy. Nick remembers the night he saw Gatsby stretching
his arms out to the water and realizes that the green light he saw was the
light at the end of Daisy’s dock. According to Jordan, Gatsby has asked her
to convince Nick to arrange a reunion between Gatsby and Daisy. Because
he is terrified that Daisy will refuse to see him, Gatsby wants Nick to invite
Daisy to tea. Without Daisy’s knowledge, Gatsby intends to come to the
tea at Nick’s house as well, surprising her and forcing her to see him.
Though Nick’s first impression of Gatsby is of his boundless hope for the
future, Chapter 4 concerns itself largely with the mysterious question of
Gatsby’s past. Gatsby’s description of his background to Nick is a daunting
puzzle—though he rattles off a seemingly far-fetched account of his grand
upbringing and heroic exploits, he produces what appears to be proof of
his story. Nick finds Gatsby’s story “threadbare” at first, but he eventually
accepts at least part of it when he sees the photograph and the medal. He
realizes Gatsby’s peculiarity, however. In calling him a “character,” he
highlights Gatsby’s strange role as an actor.
6
The luncheon with Wolfshiem gives Nick his first unpleasant impression
that Gatsby’s fortune may not have been obtained honestly. Nick perceives
that if Gatsby has connections with such shady characters as Wolfshiem,
he might be involved in organized crime or bootlegging. It is important to
remember the setting of The Great Gatsby, in terms of both the symbolic
role of the novel’s physical locations and the book’s larger attempt to
capture the essence of America in the mid-1920s. The pervasiveness of
bootlegging and organized crime, combined with the burgeoning stock
market and vast increase in the wealth of the general public during this era,
contributed largely to the heedless, excessive pleasure-seeking and sense
of abandon that permeate The Great Gatsby. For Gatsby, who throws the
most sumptuous parties of all and who seems richer than anyone else, to
have ties to the world of bootleg alcohol would only make him a more
perfect symbol of the strange combination of moral decadence and vibrant
optimism that Fitzgerald portrays as the spirit of 1920s America.
dream, and the sense of his having created a new identity in a new place all
reflect the coarse combination of pioneer individualism and uninhibited
materialism that Fitzgerald perceived as dominating 1920s American life.