In Chapter VII, Daisy strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson while driving Gatsby’s car. In Chapter VIII, Gatsby begins a vigil, which Nick shares with him for part of the night and next day, waiting for Daisy to come or call to tell him how she plans to handle the situation. He has already decided to say that he was driving.
While he and Nick wait together, Jay tells him the story of how he had transformed from Gatz to Gatsby and what the first love was like between him and Daisy. This includes the scene of their parting when Jay left for military service in World War I. On that day, the two of them sat together “tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer in their month of love.” Daisy, however, became restless and impatient and decided to break with Jay and marry Tom.
Jay cannot forget the sensation of being deeply in love, and for him, there is never any other love than Daisy. That “deep memory” never left him as he built his empire so that he could earn her back, refusing to understand that it was not any inadequacy on his part that prompted her to dump him.
On the day after the accident, after Nick leaves him, by mid-afternoon Gatsby probably accepts that Daisy will not call. Nick later wonders if Jay even cared any more. Perhaps he has finally abandoned his romantic image of Daisy. If he accepts that he had paid too much for “living too long with a single dream,” that of having Daisy, then the entire world would look different to him. Rather than the familiar or “old, warm world,” he would encounter a world that was “unfamiliar” and so cold it would make him “shiver”; one that is “grotesque” and “raw.” Nick thinks that Gatsby might have thought that George Wilson approaching through the tress was like him, one of the “poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air.”
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Nick wonders if Gatsby might have had a moment of a revelation and thinks that he "must have felt . . . he had lost the old warm world." What is that revelation, and how does it change his way of seeing the world? Pick out appropriate quotes.
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