Summary: Gatsby stops having parties and fires all of his servants in order to keep his affair with Daisy a secret. On an extremely hot day in summer, Jordan Baker, Jay Gatsby, and Nick Carraway all go to the Buchanan's house for lunch. The reader is first introduced to Daisy's baby girl, Daisy is fairly dismissive and Gatsby is shocked that the child is real. Gatsby and Daisy's love for each other is obvious and makes Tom extremely angry. Daisy invites Gatsby to the city and Tom takes up her offer and everyone goes in together. Gatsby and Daisy ride together and the others drive Gatsby's car, Tom stops for gas at Wilson's garage and learn that George has learned about Myrtle's affair and plans to leave town with her. Once in New York, they all get a suite at the Plaza and Tom begins to confront Gatsby by calling him a liar and making fun of the way they speak. In response Gatsby tells him that Daisy never loved him and Daisy backs him up, until Tom recounts occurences of love that force Daisy to admit that she did, at a time, love him. Tom orders Daisy and Gatsby to go back to the eggs and Nick realizes it is his thirtieth birthday. On the way home Jordan, Tom, and Nick find out that Myrtle has been hit by a car which Nick presumes to be Gatsbys. Gatsby is hiding in the bushes outside of Tom's house when Nick returns, he is making sure that she doesn't get hurt by Tom and tells Nick that Daisy was the one who hit Myrtle but he will take the blame. Gatsby sends Tom in to check on Daisy only to find Tom and Daisy eating and talking and reconciling their differences.
a. Tom Buchanan
b. "There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control"
c. Tom Buchanan is a large aggressive man. He is extremely hypocritical and confrontational. He is bored with his life since he has already completed his dream of being a proffesional athlete. Although Tom seems to have everything he is inarguably empty. Tom has little concern for other people's feeling and thrives off of control
d. Tom's role in the novel is extremely important. He provides an antagonist in the story. Fitzgerald uses Tom to illicit compassion for Daisy from the reader by making him such a horrible husband. He creates a necessary road block for Gatsby's plan and creates a stark contrast from Gatsby's dream world to the harsh real world in which Daisy is taken and love is corrupted.
"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."
This quote is important because it comments on how immense the pain that Wilson and other men who have been betrayed feel. At the moment Wilson finds out he has been betrayed, it is not wealth nor social standing that separates him and George Wilson but the fact that Tom's heart is not broken. This says a huge amount about the nature of heartbreak and Tom's hypocritical and skewed vision of love. Fitzgerald presents two men in a parrallel situation of betrayal and uses it to highlight Tom's lack of emotional pain from being betrayed.
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