The Great Gatsby

I know that the novel embodies the disillusionment of the American dream, so I show sympathy for Gatsby.

The beautiful and ideal girl, the love of his whole life, Daisy, was no more than a daydream and a false vision.

Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!’

‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

No – Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.

but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college.

the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans.

a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.

he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.

Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward.

a cruel body.

‘She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?’ ‘Never.’

‘Who with?’ I told him. ‘Never heard of them,’ he remarked decisively. This annoyed me.

‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires5 by this man Goddard?’

‘This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and –’ After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. ‘– And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’

the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned towards me.

He had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it began to affect his nose

Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give up his position.’

her voice glowing and singing.

‘You mean to say you don’t know?’ said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. ‘I thought everybody knew.’ ‘I don’t.’ ‘Why –’ she said hesitantly. ‘Tom’s got some woman in New York.’

‘She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Don’t you think?’

“All right,” I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

This is a valley of ashes9 – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens;

The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic – their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. ‘Awful.’

‘I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.’ This absorbing information about my neighbour was interrupted by Mrs McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:

‘I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,’ she said finally. ‘I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.’

‘The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out: “Oh, is that your suit?” I said. “This is the first I ever heard about it.” But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon.’

but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was “You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.” ’

She turned to Mrs McKee and the room rang full of her artificial laughter.

Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under the constantly changing light.

I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited – they went there.

Lemme show you.’

‘A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re – ’ ‘You told us.’

superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners

For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand. ‘I’m Gatsby,’ he said suddenly. ‘What!’ I exclaimed. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon.’ ‘I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.’

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was 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 eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished

There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.

my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased.

In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night.

‘Don’t ask me,’ said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter. ‘I know very little about driving – next to nothing. It happened, and that’s all I know.’ ‘Well, if you’re a poor driver you oughtn’t to try driving at night.’ ‘But I wasn’t even trying,’ he explained indignantly, ‘I wasn’t even trying.’

‘But the wheel’s off!’

I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes,

and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

I felt a sinking in my heart.

She was incurably dishonest.

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply

‘They’ll keep out of my way,’ she insisted. ‘It takes two to make an accident.’

and for a moment I thought I loved her.

I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

caramel-coloured suit.

‘I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West – all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.’

‘What part of the Middle West?’ I inquired casually. ‘San Francisco.’

‘After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe – Paris, Venice, Rome – collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.’

‘Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I took the remains of my machine-gun battalion so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration – even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!’

He paused. ‘I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.’

I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now. They were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory.

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a début after the armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before.

‘Here, deares’.’

The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths – so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.

‘He’s afraid, he’s waited so long. He thought you might be offended. You see, he’s regular tough underneath it all.’

‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.’

and Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie, hurried in. He was pale, and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.

‘One of the papers said they thought the rain would stop about four. I think it was The Journal.

‘Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?’ The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.

Daisy’s voice on a clear artificial note:

‘I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.’ A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall, so I went into the room.

‘We haven’t met for many years,’ said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.

‘We haven’t met for many years,’ said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be. ‘Five years next November.’

‘This is a terrible mistake,’ he said, shaking his head from side to side, ‘a terrible, terrible mistake.’ ‘You’re just embarrassed, that’s all,’ and luckily I added: ‘Daisy’s embarrassed too.’ ‘She’s embarrassed?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘Just as much as you are.’ ‘Don’t talk so loud.’ ‘You’re acting like a little boy,’ I broke out impatiently. ‘Not only that, but you’re rude. Daisy’s sitting in there all alone.’

But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.

‘I’m glad, Jay.’ Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.

‘Yes.’ His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. ‘It took me just three years to earn the money that bought it.’

the sparkling odour of jonquils and the frothy odour of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odour of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir

the sparkling odour of jonquils and the frothy odour of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odour of kiss-me-at-the-gate.

except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold.

‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’

‘You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.’

Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

‘Here’s a lot of clippings – about you.’

The rich get richer and the poor get–children.

Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.

James Gatz of North Dakota,

James Gatz – that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career – when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.

his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all.

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.

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace.

he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled.

for himself he formed the habit of letting liquor alone.

‘I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.’

Daisy’s voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.

and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek.

‘I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these

‘I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.’

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’ After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house – just as if it were five years ago.

‘You can’t repeat the past.’ ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’

just out of reach of his hand.

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was…

At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something – an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never went into West Egg village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but ordered moderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that the kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was that the new people weren’t servants at all.

‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly.

It was full of money – that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…

Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded eyes came into sight down the road,

‘I’ve been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to go West.’ ‘Your wife does,’ exclaimed Tom, startled. ‘She’s been talking about it for ten years.’ He rested for a moment against the pump, shading his eyes. ‘And now she’s going whether she wants to or not. I’m going to get her away.’

He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before – and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind,

His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control.

They were out in the open at last and Gatsby was content.

Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.’

he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

‘Your wife doesn’t love you,’ said Gatsby. ‘She’s never loved you. She loves me.’

‘She never loved you, do you hear?’ he cried. ‘She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!’

‘Daisy, that’s all over now,’ he said earnestly. ‘It does’t matter any more. Just tell him the truth – that you never loved him – and it’s all wiped out forever.’ She looked at him blindly. ‘Why – how could I love him – possibly?’ ‘You never loved him.’ She hesitated.

‘Oh, you want too much!’ she cried to Gatsby. ‘I love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.’ She began to sob helplessly. ‘I did love him once – but I loved you too.’

‘He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts.

‘And you left him in the lurch, didn’t you? You let him go to jail for a month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject of you.’

But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up,

Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

‘He won’t touch her,’ I said. ‘He’s not thinking about her.’

They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale – and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

He found her excitingly desirable.

such a beautiful house before.

Daisy lived there

that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes.

eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

he let her believe that he was a person from much the same strata as herself – that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities – he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.

She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby – nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.

When they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was, somehow, betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

She didn’t see why he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.

of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality

‘In any case, ‘he said, ‘it was just personal.’

which they had driven in her white car.

he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’

concealing his incorruptible dream,

I don’t know which of us hung up with a sharp click, but I know I didn’t care.

‘I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it, but I knew it was something funny.’

paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all.

I think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz arrived from a town in Minnesota.

‘If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill.44 He’d of helped build up the country.’

‘Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,’ he suggested. ‘After that my own rule is to let everything alone.’

He knew he had a big future in front of him. And ever since he made a success he was very generous with me.’

Hopalong Cassidy.

Rise from bed 6.00 A.M.

Dumbell exercise and wall-scaling 6.15–6.30

Study electricity, etc 7.15–8.15

Work 8.30–4.30 P.M.

Baseball and sports 4.30–5.00

Practise elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00–6.00

Study needed inventions 7.00–9.00

GENERAL RESOLVES No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable] No more smokeing or chewing. Bath every other day Read one improving book or magazine per week Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week Be better to parents

‘Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something. Do you notice what he’s got about improving his mind? He was always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat him for it.’

I think he rather expected me to copy down the list for my own use.

before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

For just a minute I wondered if I wasn’t making a mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up to say goodbye.

‘You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.’

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

原来一开始菲茨杰拉德想叫这本书“长岛【西卵】的特里马乔 （Trimalchio）”，Trimalchio是古罗马作家佩特罗尼乌斯的小说《萨蒂利孔》中的人物，他是个白手起家无趣的暴发户，看来这儿的“great”有很强的讽刺意味，不过倒是挺符合美国那种Make America Great Again的浮夸风格。

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”