Important Quotations About Jay Gatsby (and James Gatz)
Jay
Gatsby:
Ø
This quotation serves as a
delineation of Nick’s stances regarding Gatsby’s lifestyle and also that of the
so called “polite society”: “Gatsby, who represented everything for which I
have an unaffected scorn” (pg. 4).
Ø
Gatsby’s pretentious and plastic
manners reflect themselves back on Nick’s conceptualization of him: “If
personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was
something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of
life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register
earthquakes ten thousand miles away” (pg. 4).
·
The word “gestures” implies some
sense of artificiality.
Ø
This quotation displays the
charming nature of Gatsby, which makes him a great cover in Wolfsheim’s
bootlegging business and also aids him in climbing the ladder of higher
socio-economical levels: “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 external world for an instant and then
concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood
you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would
like to believe in yourself” (pg. 40).
Ø
Nick realizes that Gatsby had some
relation to the working-class of the society and implies this through his word
choice: “I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over
thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd” (pg. 41).
·
Roughneck: an oil rig worker—a
person belonging to the lower social stratum. Therefore, “elegant” and
“roughneck” signal to a contradiction in terms.
Ø
A great foreshadowing and simple
illustration of a major theme in the novel; that is, “trying to recreate the
past”:
“’I
wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’
‘Can’t
repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’” (pg. 90).
Ø
Tom Buchanan gives a short
recapitulation of Gatsby’s true past and the following events: “I suppose the
last thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your
wife” (pg. 106).
Ø
After finally noticing that his
long-pursued dreams were a lost call, Gatsby realizes that, contrary to his
fantasies, the world is not as “warm” or welcoming as he thought it was.
Moreover, this quotation advocates to the collapse of the American Dream: “[Gatsby]
must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for
living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar
sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing
a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass” (pg.
132).
James
Gatz:
Ø
James Gatz’s denial of his identity
is presented: “I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then.
His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had
never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay
Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of
himself” (pg. 80).
Ø
Gatz’s leaning towards becoming
Gatsby is illustrated: “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 row-boat, pulled out to the Tuolomee and informed Cody that a wind
might catch him and break him up in half an hour” (pg. 80).
Ø
Despite the overt, Gatz cannot, at
first, adapt to his new conception of himself: “But his heart was in a
constant, turbulent riot” (pg. 81)
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