Quote

Analysis

Theme/Significance

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth. (1.3)

Here, Nick says that money isn't the only thing that some people are born to. Some people are naturally just nicer and more honest: they have more "sense of the fundamental decencies." But does Nick believe that poor people can be born with these fundamental decencies, too, or do you have to be rich to have natural class?

Character of Nick

Theme of Society/Class

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reactionGatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. (1.4)

Gatsby may be low-class, but Nick still manages to see something good in him, anyway. Maybe he has the "natural decencies" that other members of high society don't. Except, we think this might be a little like the, "but I have a lot of ______ friends" excuse to make someone not sound racist or xenophobic.)

Character of Nick

Theme of Society/Class

I lived at West Egg, the well, the least fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionairesall for eighty dollars a month. (1.14)

It may be a small house, but at least Nick gets to live near millionaires. He's joking, but this is the same logic that makes people buy designer sunglasses: you may not be able to afford the actual clothes, but you still get to have a little reflected glamour. Hey, no judgment here.

Character of Nick

Theme of Society/Class

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and he champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his motor-boats slid the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. (3.1)

Okay, so the parties sound fabulous. These people are definitely partying like it's 1999, or whatever. But what we're really into is that Nick actually notices the servantsthe people who end up cleaning up the mess. Remember that Nick has to clean up after Daisy and Tom. Maybe he identifies a little bit with the servants.

Character of Nick

Theme of Society/Class

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. (4.135)

Money might not make you happy, but there's some consolation in a $350K string of pearls. If you have to be depressed, you might as well be depressed on a yacht, right?

Character of Nick

Character of Daisy

Theme of Society/Class

We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around.

"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." (8.44-45)

Check out that use of the word "worth." Daisy and Tom may have been born with money, but they're not "worth" anything. But Gatsbydespite his ill-gotten moneyis.

Character of Nick

Character of Gatsby

Theme of Society/Class

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one . . . just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." Chapter 1

"what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men." Chapter 1

"I hope she'll be a fool that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool . . . You see, I think everything's terrible anyhow . . . And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Chapter 1

"Involuntarily I glanced seawardand distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock." Chapter 1

"This is a valley of ashes a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air." Chapter 2

"He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive." Chapter 2

"I married him because I thought he was a gentleman . . . I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe." Chapter 2

"He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in, and never told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out . . . I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried . . . all afternoon." Chapter 2

"I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited they went there." Chapter 3

"I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library." Chapter 3

"I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life." Chapter 3

"It takes two to make an accident." Chapter 3

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. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself. Chapter 3

"Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." Chapter 3

"I belong to another generation . . . As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won't impose myself on you any longer." Chapter 4

"'A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: 'There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.'" Chapter 4

"Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes." Chapter 5

"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry." Chapter 5

"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. (5.121-122)

"His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God . . . and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end." Chapter 6

"Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans." Chapter 7

"I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands." Chapter 7

"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight." Chapter 7

"It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy it increased her value in his eyes." Chapter 8

"When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different . . . I stuck with them to the end . . . Let us learn to show friends