Chapter 3- p. 39-59

Chapter 3- p. 39-59

Summary: After watching his neighbor, Gatsby, throw parties weekend after weekend, Nick Carraway is finally given an invitation to one by Gatsby’s chauffeur. He arrives at the party alone and looks for someone he knows, and finds Jordan, the professional golfer. They spend the rest of the evening together looking for their host, Gatsby, who is absent from the party. The two look for him in the library and instead find a drunk old man who is amazed by the walls of real books. Finally they give up their search, sit down and begin talking to a middle aged man who reveals himself as Gatsby. After inviting Nick to fly airplanes with him, Gatsby retreats back to his office to take a phone call. Later in the night Gatsby calls Jordan into his office to talk. Nick is one of the last guests to leave and witnesses a car accident in Gatsby’s driveway. Nick stays in touch with Jordan after the party and begins to become quite fond of her, despite her carelessness and dishonesty. Nick ends the chapter by declaring that he is one of the last honest men.

Jay Gatsby

“He’s just a man named Gatsby” -Jordan, p. 48

Jay Gatsby is far more ordinary than the reader would expect him to be. He is slightly inverted and has an emptiness about him, despite the lavish events he puts on. He is immaculately kept and extremely careful. Gatsby has an amazing smile that has a quality of reassurance in it and faces the entire world before zoning in on the person he is aiming to smile at, but after his smile fades Gatsby is an elegant rough neck.

Gatsby is the man for which the book is named, he is also the man that Nick has seemingly been interested or almost obsessed with since the first chapter. It is clear that Gatsby has a large role in this novel. Gatsby’s romantic nature foreshadows that his story may take a romantic turn. Gatsby’s loneliness and meaningless parties also imply that he is waiting for a particular person. Based on his longing stance toward the East Egg I have reason to believe the object of Gatsby’s affection is Daisy Buchanan.

“There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners-”

Even though Fitzgerald is talking about dancing he is really making a metaphor for the party as a whole as well as society as a whole. The old men pushing the young girls represents the power position the men hold in society. The eternal graceless circles represent the party, never ending, without a purpose, and without grace. Couples holding each other to be fashionable when really they are tortured by their forced and faux image of happiness.