This Was Insane Part Deux. [Ch 8]
Once again, my mind is so frazzled from some of the events in this chapter that, in order to process, I will cover sections that caught my eyes in the order in which they happened, not by importance necessarily. To start with is a quote from Page 153, where Nick observes that “there was an autumn flavor in the air.” This immediately made me think back to Page 118, one focus point of my previous point, where Jordan says: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” Knowing Fitzgerald and his writing style, I knew these two were supposed to be linked in order for the reader to make a conclusion about their predictions. My prediction had been that something was to happen to the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby, based off of this quote and how Daisy showed she that had no intentions of exposing her affair with Gatsby, and this was confirmed by this chapter’s quote and how it continues with the butler warning Gatsby that fall is coming, and the summer pool should be drained.
Note to self: on a separate topic, remember to go back into the earlier chapters in the novel where Nick first describes the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg’s advertisement. I am not sure if this has literary symbolism or not, but it did strike me when Wilson told Michaelis on Page 160 that “God sees everything,” and looking out the window into the large eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg.
Back to the more analytical part of my blog, another Gatsby-Ahab connection could be made on Page 161:
“…he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”
This quote basically addresses the dangers of monomania (Moby Dick for Ahab, Daisy and what she represented for Gatsby), and both men fell victim to this. Gatsby had gone too long waiting for Daisy, a now-married woman, and staring across at the green lantern at the end of her dock. And when after years he finally was able to get her within his reach, he became dependent on her and brought all of his old feelings to the surface just as if Time had been paused for him those years they were apart. Of course it is romantic in a slightly sketchy way, but now Gatsby will be taking the blame for her running over Myrtle Wilson, and Daisy has left him alone.
And then I turned the page. It actually took me one regular-paced reading, and then a full chapter skim-over for me to understand what had happened. I understood that Wilson was dead, but it took me forever to comprehend that he had shot Gatsby first before shooting himself. Oh My God… Well, now Daisy and Tom’s extramarital affairs have both come to a rather drastic end, right? Now they are forced to be together, and Gatsby never fully got Daisy — which would symbolically mean the same thing as saying that Gatsby died trying to reach the “ungraspable” American dream, and did not completely succeed. I have to say, Gatsby is the saddest character that I have ever come across in literature. I think I feel for him more than I did for his polar opposite, Boo Radley, who had previously held that title for me.
