The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby Chapter Three
TASK 36
The final section of the chapter addresses Nick’s fascination with
Jordan Baker; interestingly her name is in fact two makes of American
car. Cars in this novel are used both as symbols and images and as
Nick begins to see what lies behind ‘The bored haughty face that she
turned to the world’, he recognises her for what she really is. Jordan is
unscrupulous, careless and prepared to cheat. She ‘instinctively
[avoids] clever, shrewd men’ because she is ‘incurably dishonest’. In
Nick’s exchange with Jordan about her poor driving, they are both
aware that they are in fact having a discussion about ethical standards
and about personal ethics in any relationship. Jordan exploits the
discussion to manoeuvre Nick into a closer relationship, thus asserting
her advantage when she says, ‘That’s why I like you’ (p.65). She sees
Nick as morally safe, a “careful driver”, who obeys ‘interior rules that
act as brakes on [his] desires’. Nick is a gentleman who still maintains
a belief in the traditional mores of gentleman and lady and the
exchange suggests that Jordan, although a woman who needs to
‘satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body’, also desires the
protection offered to a lady by traditional values.
At the end of the chapter, how do we, the readers, see Nick?
Nick’s concluding comment that ‘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’ seems to present him as smug.
He has so far been presented to us as a man who has been
untouched and untried by experience and it is this that makes him
believe himself to have a moral integrity that others lack. At this point
in the novel Nick remains morally aloof, a man with no real emotional
commitment.
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