The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby Chapter Five
TASK 47
with his subsequent tactless offer to pay him ‘for a service’, suggesting
that Gatsby’s good breeding lags behind his wealth. Still, if Tom is any
representation of “old money”, manners and fine feelings, in
Fitzgerald’s world, do not necessarily go hand in hand with worldly
status. And Gatsby is sensitive enough to realise that Nick would not
relish a ‘gonnegtion’ with Wolfshiem.
‘I was too absorbed to be responsive’, Nick, continues and we suspect
that the story may be about to take a new turn as a romance with
Jordan develops or at least becomes pleasantly interesting. But
Fitzgerald is more concerned with Gatsby’s story than with Nick’s. So
we next see the narrator, ringing Daisy. ‘Don’t bring Tom’, he says –
so already he seems complicit.
Make notes on the significance of the weather and the presentation of
Gatsby on the day of the visit.
The day of the visit opens with ‘pouring rain’ and similar hints of
pathetic fallacy crop up all through the chapter. There are more details
of Gatsby’s impressive preparations and the gorgeousness of his own
clothes but dark-eyed with sleeplessness and too overwrought to
concentrate. ‘I don’t believe he saw a thing’, Nick tells us. Now the
meeting is so imminent, he is described as “vague”, “hollow”, “with
vacant eyes”, starting at the possibility of ‘invisible but alarming
happenings’ as he waits and giving up too soon. His agitation
communicates itself to Nick, who feels ‘a little harrowed myself”.
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