Great Gatsby Chapter Journals
Daisy says these words as she describes to Nick and Jordan her hopes for her young daughter. Daisy is not a fool herself but because of her surroundings intelligent women are not viewed as valuable. Opposite of the older generation, the younger generation enjoys the thoughtless minds of the young and vulnerable women only seeking pleasure and not those that cater to their needs. Daisy’s remark is somewhat cynical: while she addresses the social values of her era, she does not seem to mind them.
Rather, she describes that she is bored with life and it seems like she implies that a girl can have more fun if she is beautiful and simplistic. Daisy often conforms to the social expectation of the American woman in order to avoid issues. “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. As a part of Nick’s first close examination of Gatsby’s character and appearance he describes that Gatsby’s smile captures both the theatrical quality of Gatsby’s character and his personality.
Additionally, it captures the manner in which Gatsby appears to everyone in the outside world. His smile seems to be both an important part of the role in the character. Here, Nick describes Gatsby’s rare focus—he has the ability to make anyone he smiles at feel as though he has chosen that person out of “the whole external world. ” “With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. This is when Gatsby is telling Nick about his life. Nick is trying to restrain himself from laughter because he knows that there is something wrong with what Gatsby is saying. As he continues, Jordan looks like she knows he is lying so when Nick looks at her he feels that it’s all bogus. From what Nick believes, what Gatsby is saying is so in the moment because there isn’t a lot of detail in his story to go on and see if it’s true or not. Gatsby is saying that he lived so well after his family had all died and that he travelled a lot and that he had his life pretty much made for him.
If that was all true why would he be living in a place like west egg? “The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—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. ” When Nick is describing Gatsby he uses this bold comparison between Gatsby and Jesus Christ to illuminate what Gatsby has created himself to be.
Jesus is described to be “faithful to his self-created dream but scornful of the factual truth that finally crushes him and his dream”—an appropriate description of Gatsby. Though the comparison between Gatsby and Jesus is not an important event in The Great Gatsby, it is nonetheless a suggestive comparison, as Gatsby transforms himself into the image that he envisioned for himself as a youngster and remains committed to that idea, despite the obstacles that society presents to the fulfillment of his dream. “’God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson. These were the last words that George Wilson had said before he murdered Gatsby in the end of the chapter. It is showing the madness that came from his realization of the affair and the death of his wife, but maybe this could be indicating that he was the only sane one of all the characters in the end. With the rough life that George had, he did not experience the immorality of society in the 1920s. The abuse of money, the new crimes developed, and the other aspects of life were not able to corrupt his lifetyle in the Valley of Ashes.
Being a poor man, it was his dream to be rich and make a life for himself and his wife in New York City, but living, isolated, in the Valley of Ashes kept his morals. All of the characters seemed to be blinded by the lifestyle that surrounded them. They were rich, or wanted to be in George’s case, and were blinded by the corruption of society. They could not see what harm they were doing to each other and themselves and started keeping secrets, having affairs and causing unneeded destruction.
God was the only one that could see their flaws and lies; he could look past their secrets and see the real people on the inside – the bad people they had become. “Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan, and I, were all Westeners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly inadaptable to Eastern life. ” Gatsby had the dream of coming back with Daisy. He got money just to achieve his dream, and try to make it work, but it did not work. Gatsby tried to put the values into the wrong place. Gatsby also cared too much about people’s feelings and he made friends to easily.
