He then accuses Gatsby of running a bootlegging operation. Daisy, in love with Gatsby earlier in the afternoon, feels herself moving closer and closer to Tom as she observes the quarrel.
As the row quiets down, Nick realizes that it is his thirtieth birthday. Driving back to Long Island, Nick, Tom, and Jordan discover a frightening scene on the border of the valley of ashes.
Someone has been fatally hit by an automobile. Tom thinks that Wilson will remember the yellow car from that afternoon.
He also assumes that Gatsby was the driver. Gatsby says that he has been waiting there in order to make sure that Tom did not hurt Daisy. He tells Nick that Daisy was driving when the car struck Myrtle, but that he himself will take the blame.
Still worried about Daisy, Gatsby sends Nick to check on her. Nick finds Tom and Daisy eating cold fried chicken and talking. They have reconciled their differences, and Nick leaves Gatsby standing alone in the moonlight. Chapter 7 brings the conflict between Tom and Gatsby into the open, and their confrontation over Daisy brings to the surface troubling aspects of both characters. The importance of time and the past manifests itself in the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom.
Gatsby needs to know that she has always loved him, that she has always been emotionally loyal to him. Disregarding her almost capricious lack of concern for him, Gatsby sacrifices himself for Daisy. In both cases, Gatsby stands alone in the moonlight pining for Daisy.
Gatsby invests Daisy with an idealistic perfection that she cannot possibly attain in reality and pursues her with a passionate zeal that blinds him to her limitations. Gatsby is contrasted most consistently with Nick. Additionally, whereas Tom is a cold-hearted, aristocratic bully, Gatsby is a loyal and good-hearted man.
Though his lifestyle and attitude differ greatly from those of George Wilson, Gatsby and Wilson share the fact that they both lose their love interest to Tom. Ace your assignments with our guide to The Great Gatsby!
SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. How does Nick Carraway first meet Jay Gatsby? Why did Daisy marry Tom? Why does Gatsby arrange for Nick to have lunch with Jordan Baker? How does Tom find out about the affair between Gatsby and Daisy?
How does Gatsby make his money? How are West Egg and East Egg different? From this moment, he spends his days trying to recapture the beauty that he basked in while with young Daisy Fay. Upon hearing Gatsby's true story, Nick cannot help but be moved and spends the rest of the day worrying about his friend. While in the city, Nick tries desperately to keep focused on his work, but can't seem to do so. What he has realized through Gatsby's story and the events of the previous night , and part of what is troubling him, is that he has come to know the shallowness of "polite society.
In fact, when Jordan phones Nick at work he is unwilling to speak to her, finding himself more and more irritated by her shallow and self-serving ways.
In rejecting her the first man ever to do so Nick has grown, not only seeing what dark stuff that socialites are really made of, but possessing the courage to stand against it.
Midway through the chapter, Fitzgerald shifts focus to the valley of ashes and has Nick recount what had gone on there in the hours prior. George Wilson has become overwhelmed with grief at the loss of his wife. Directly contrasting Tom Buchanan who is unable to experience a heartfelt emotion , George is devastated and overwhelmed by emotion. His neighbor, Michaelis, tries to console him, but nothing seems to help. George lives in an effectual wasteland, void of spirituality, void of life, and when in his grief he tells Michaelis of his last day with Myrtle, he turns to the giant billboard above him.
In what is perhaps his most lucid statement in the whole book, Wilson explains the purpose of Doctor T. Eckleburg's enormous eyes. They are the eyes of God, and "God sees everything.
Wilson's grief knows no bounds and while Michaelis sleeps, he heads in to town, eventually tracking Gatsby down and killing him while he floats on an air mattress in his swimming pool. Fitzgerald has made clear earlier in the chapter that autumn is at hand, and it naturally brings with it the ending of life — natural and human, both.
Wilson, still overcome by grief and the bad judgment it invokes, finds his way to Gatsby's house tipped off by Tom, as Nick discovers in Chapter 9 and kills Gatsby, mistakenly thinking that he is responsible for Myrtle's death. Gatsby's death, alone in his pool, brings forth a couple of distinct images. On the one hand, his death is a rebirth of sorts. Gatsby has done nothing more than follow a dream, and despite his money and his questionable business dealings, he is nothing at all like the East Egg socialites he runs with.
One admires him, if for no other reason than his ability to sustain a dream in a world that is historically inhospitable to dreamers. His death has, in a sense, removed him from his mortal existence and allowed him rebirth into a different, hopefully better, life.
As Nick says, Gatsby "must have felt that he had lost the old warm world" when his dream died, and found no reason to go on. In that sense, Wilson's murdering him is a welcome end. On another level, Gatsby's death at the hands of George Wilson makes his quest complete. His dream is completely dead, but he can make one more chivalric gesture: He can be killed in Daisy's stead.
By lying in the pool, Gatsby is doing nothing to protect himself, as if he is saying that he won't refuse whatever is ahead of him. In some sense, Gatsby helps Wilson by refusing to be proactive in his own defense. Until the very end, Gatsby remains the dreamer, that most rare of jewels in the modern world.
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