Great Gatsby Chapter 5 notes

Describe how Gatsby and Daisy respond to one another throughout their entire meeting.

• GATSBY:
• ‘An hour later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie, hurried in.’  
• Firstly, we notice the colour of his clothes – silver and gold are closely associated with money and wealth – he wants to show Daisy how wealthy he is now.  However, if we picture how he would look, he will come across very ostentatious, lavish, garish and gaudy, not unlike his house and car.

• When Nick asks him about the grass he replies ‘What grass?’  Nick tells us that he ‘looked out the window at it, but, judging from his expression, I don’t believe he saw a thing.’  On the surface he is too anxious about his meeting with Daisy.  On a deeper level we meet again the reference to blindness here:  Gatsby is too blind to realise his dream can never become a reality; the past cannot be repeated.

• Shortly after this Gatsby is ‘peering towards the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside.’
• Again, Gatsby is obsessing over his meeting with Daisy but we can notice the same recurring reference to blindness – this time associated with Gatsby and his impossible dream.

• ‘He sat down miserably’
• When Daisy arrives Gatsby is as ‘pale as death’ – again we notice the death imagery so crucial in foreshadowing the forthcoming events in the novel – here we pay close attention to Gatsby’s dream.
• He is ‘glaring tragically’
• He believes initially ‘This is a terrible mistake…a terrible terrible mistake.’  He is right.
• Nick tells him to stop ‘acting like a little boy’

• ‘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.’

• As well as being exhilarated by Daisy’s presence this is where Gatsby’s dream is about to come into fruition and be realised but what he cannot understand yet is that Daisy will inevitably fall short of his dreams.  The fact that his radiance fills the ‘little room’ already suggests that it is too much, that Daisy could never hope to live up to his grand expectations.  This is the climax of Gatsby’s dream.  From here it can only disappoint him.

• ‘It took me just three years to earn the money that bought it.’  
• Gatsby has clearly worked very hard to attain and realise his dream – Daisy.  He knows he was not worthy of her five years ago and now he feels with an ostentatious,  meretricious display of wealth and material possessions that he can win her back.

‘… I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.  Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real.’

• This is highly significant to Gatsby’s situation.  He has worked hard to acquire all that he possesses – not for himself, but for Daisy.  Ultimately she is his dream – the wealth and material aspects are only a means to an end, something he had to do to achieve his goal.  But now, ‘in her…presence’ it does not seem ‘real’.  Again this highlights the fact that the dream can never be realised – everything he owns is superficial; Daisy herself is frivolous and superficial; his embellished fantasy is so out of touch with any hint of reality that it is doomed to fail – and it does.  Ch. 5 then is pivotal in that from this point onwards ‘his count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.’

DAISY

• ‘…Daisy’s voice on a clear artificial note’
• Again, we can notice the superficial and artificial quality that is so synonymous with Daisy.  Again, Fitzgerald applies the wider significance of this in effectively conveying the attitudes and conduct of people during this era in general.

 ‘…Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. “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.’

• ‘The pompadour!  You never told me you had a pompadour – or a yacht.’
• Daisy’s emotional attachment is not to Gatsby, but rather to the splendid display of his wealth and possessions.  She is shallow, empty, and lacks any substance.  Such emptiness leads to an egregious moral indifference as the story unfolds.  Fitzgerald uses characters like Daisy to reflect the careless, irresponsible, thoughtless, amoral attitudes of the time.  Daisy is more representative of  people  during the decadent world of the Jazz Age.  Look out for other examples of her emptiness.

What is the weather like?

• Rainfall appears when Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first time – this ominously foreshadows their relationship and Gatsby’s fate.  The next time it rains is at Gatsby’s funeral.
• It is interesting to take note of the religious symbolism here again foreshadowing Gatsby’s inevitable fate.
• Gatsby says the rain is supposed to stop at four – it stops at 3 30.  Later Gatsby is shot by Wilson about 3 30 and was supposed to receive a telephone message by 4.  His death is foreshadowed by the rain. We could interpret Gatsby here as Christ being crucified (see refs to the cross), dying for Daisy’s sins.

• It is not surprising that Fitzgerald chooses such striking religious symbolism during a time where God’s presence passed largely unnoticed by a society more driven by wealth and decadence.  
• The time of Gatsby’s death even parallels roughly the time when Jesus died on the cross.

Write a detailed commentary of ‘Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance…’

• The green light is one of the most important symbols in the book.  It symbolises Gatsby’s dream of winning back Daisy.  When he stares at the light he adorns and embellishes Daisy with qualities she could never hope to fulfil in reality.  We can look back at chapter one:
• ‘But I didn’t call to him…he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and , far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling.  Involuntarily, I glanced seaward, and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.’

•  ‘stretched out’ and ‘trembling’.  It is not until chapter 5 that we realise the true significance of this light.
• The green light is also an image which recurs throughout the novel – representing the hope felt by the Dutch sailors when they saw the green breast of land that was America – yet the American Dream , just like Gatsby’s dream, is often bound to fail because it goes too far beyond the potential of reality.