The Great Gatsby Chapters 7-9

Tom’s and Daisy’s Relationship

• Daisy showing off her daughter`

  • Getting back at Tom

  • Daisy sees her as an ornament

• Daisy running over Myrtle

  • Emphasizing her commitment to Tom

  • Gatsby’s car killed Myrtle

    • Gatsby car is gold-- like money

    • Symbolic of regular people suffering because of the rich

“They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.” (155)

• Plays into the overall theme of rich abusing the poor and class struggle

• Daisy chooses Tom over Gatsby

• Tom shatters Gatsby’s illusion of Daisy

  • His dream cannot trump their Tom’s and Daisy’s reality

  • Specifically, her daughter is her reality

Daisy’s voice

“Her voice is full of money” (126)

• Gatsby uses this to describe Daisy

• Demonstrating his class and wealth while also her superficiality

Mr. Wilson

“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.” (132)

• Shows how Tom and Wilson are alike

“Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ash heaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.” (170)

• Use of color grey shows the decay of moral character

• Shows Wilson skewed morality

• Tom thinks Gatsby deserved to die

  • His blind arrogance allows him to do so

  • Feels no remorse

• Tom mourned terribly after Myrtle's death--had to give up New York apartment

• Nick describes him as childlike

• Too shallow and vacant to understand what he did

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated 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….” (191)

• The rich like Daisy and Tom have no regard for the others around them and who they hurt

Gatsby’s funeral

• Owl eyed glasses

  • The real Eckleburg?

  • Also the man from the first part of the book

• Funeral for the American dream

  • Failure of it

  • The American dream is not a possibility

• His father comes

  • Proud of Gatsby

  • Slowly stares more and more at the wealth he amassed

Gatsby’s Death

• Gatsby shot in pool

  • Use of color grey

    • Shows how his reality and dream died in bleakness and a harsh world

“If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” (172)

• Use of color red

  • Shows how he died

“‘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.” (164)

• Nick says this before his death

Class Struggle

• Gatsby is sacrificed while daisy continues with her life as normal

  • Gatsby did not know Daisy

  • Gatsby clings to the idea that Daisy needs him despite that not being the case

• Fitzgerald shows poor as collateral damage to a way of life

• Daisy and Tom continue with their normal life

“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” (168)

Doctor Eckleburg

“I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window [...] and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!’/ ‘ Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night./ ‘God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson./ ‘That’s an advertisement,’ Michaelis assured him.” (170-171)

• Reminds how characters have shed their morality in pursuit of personal gain

• Money and Consumerism is god

  • Use of color gold

American Dream

• Green light

  • Finally describes it as the American Dream

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (193)

• Green Light: past dreams of the future

• People try to achieve dreams by transcending/ recreating the past

  • Gatsby with Daisy

• People will spend their energy trying to get it while their dream just moves farther and farther away

  • Jordan is described as the opposite of this

“But there was Jordan beside me who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.” (145)

• Gatsby was so close to achieving it but never did

  • Never realized his dream although he achieved the rags to riches American Dream

  • Gatsby’s poverty (new money) prevented him from ever fitting in