What made Gatsby great?
Although both social groups live in separate spaces – the aristocrats in East Egg and the “nouveau riche” West Egg – Gatsby’s parties configure a space where guests from different backgrounds coexist.
This chapter describes the first party attended by the Buchanans at Gatsby’s mansion. During the event, Nick gets drunk and states: “about the last thing I remember was standing with Daisy watching the film director and his Star of him” (2011: 145).
He thus recognizes himself, at times, as an unreliable narrator. Furthermore, he makes it clear that the Buchanans are not comfortable with the class heterogeneity that exists among the characters at the party. Accustomed to living in a bubble made up of people of the same social status, Gatsby’s party forces them to live with personalities of different origins.
Daisy “was appalled at West Egg” (2011: 145), she “saw something horrible in the very simplicity that she couldn’t understand” (2011: 145). Nick says that what Daisy finds horrible at the party is seeing people she’s not faking. Both Daisy and Tom are isolated by their wealth and live in a world of restraint, decorum, and posturing that has nothing to do with the ways of attending Gatsby’s parties.
Daisy seduces strangers and sings during the party.
Given this, Tom makes sexist comments about his wife: “My God, maybe I’m old-fashioned in my ideas but nowadays women are out there too much for my taste” (2011: 141). Faced with small signs of independence from her wife, Tom tries to censor and subdue her, following traditional gender values.
Finally, it becomes clear in this chapter that Gatsby blurs the line between reality and illusion. He tells Nick that he wants Daisy to tell Tom that she doesn’t love him, and thinks that, in this way, he can modify the past:
“Once she had erased four years with that sentence” (2011:148) they could return to Louisville and marry “just like it was five years ago” (2011:148). Nick describes him as crazy and then admits:
“I gathered that he wanted something back, some idea of himself perhaps, that he had invested in loving Daisy” (2011: 149). As suggested before, the idea that Gatsby does not fall in love with Daisy or with love, but with a particular moment in their history together that he wants to relive (2006), becomes evident again. rent a car in Dubai
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