The Great Gatsby — Chapter V
I’ve seen fire, and I’ve seen rain — both elements characterize the fifth chapter. This is the chapter in which Gatsby’s dream is fulfilled, and he meets Daisy at last.
Nick speaks with Gatsby on a night when Gatsby’s mansion appears to “blaze gaudily on,” “like the World’s Fair.” They arrange for Gatsby to meet Daisy at Nick’s house. Gatsby maintains a diffident manner throughout. He offers Nick a quid pro quo for the meeting, “a rather confidential sort of thing.” Nick admits that under different circumstances this offer might constitute a moral crisis, but because “the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered,” he cuts Gatsby off. He’s not a pimp, after all.
Gatsby shows up for tea the next day, looking like a million bucks in “a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie.” Throughout this chapter we see in the plainest terms the degree to which Gatsby equates personal worth with material possessions, not only regarding himself but also in others.
Daisy arrives during a pause in the rain, as light and merry as ever. Gatsby presents “a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom,” but actually he is miserable. This is the moment he has been living for for five years. Nick leaves the room and returns. During his absence another of the book’s magical transformations has taken place:
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.
It stops raining, and so the moment has come for Daisy to visit Gatsby’s mansion, which itself glows in the sun. The owl-eyed man from Chapter III makes a phantasmal appearance as they tour the library (”I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter”).
Fitzgerald quite literally lays out for us Gatsby’s moral economy: “I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.” But what is it Daisy is responding to? Period rooms, gold toilet sets, wardrobes full of clothes. Gatsby and Daisy consummate their meeting as Gatsby throws heaps of his handmade shirts into the room.
Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”
The French have a word for it.
The magical aspect of Gatsby’s life is so wrapped up in his dreams of Daisy that the enchantment begins to fade almost immediately upon their meeting. The green light on the Buchanan’s dock is subtracted from Gatsby’s “count of enchanted objects,” and Nick senses that the reality of Daisy has inevitably fallen short of “the colossal vitality of his illusion.”
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[...] Chapter V [...]