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Study
Guide for The
Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter
3 (43-64)
Party#3: Summer Parties on West Egg
at Gatsby's Mansion
PARAGRAPH: Describe the amenities available at
Gatsby's mansion as it turns into the ultimate summer party machine:
| Rolls Royce service to Manhattan... station wagon
makes regular trips to the train station... raft with diving tower,
beach, two motor boats, automatic orange squeezer for two hundred...
caterers with covered lights and buffet tables loaded with ham, turkey,
and pastry: enough for early and late suppers ....bars with real brass
rails and stocked with booze.... a full orchestra!
It's Club Med; its the ultimate amusement park!
Everything is free and everyone is invited. Hey, tear your
evening dress and a package arrives from Courier's a week later! One
drunk guy is amazed that the books in the library are all real, but the
pages have not been cut. He refers to Gatsby as a 'regular
Belasco'. Who is that?
For a few weeks that summer, the party goes on
almost every night!
The lights grow brighter
as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is
playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key
higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality,
tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell
with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there
are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the
stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre
of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the
sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing
light.
Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out
of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like
Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the
orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a
burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda
Gray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun. (44-45) |
More on Flappers of the 1920's: (from
Jazz Age Culture, U. of Pittsburgh):
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Yet Gatsby is only rarely seen! What kind of
rumors circulate about him?
"Gatsby.
Somebody told me----"
The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.
"Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once."
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and
listened eagerly.
"I don't think it's so much THAT," argued Lucille skeptically; "it's
more that he was a German spy during the war."
One of the men nodded in confirmation.
"I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in
Germany," he assured us positively.
"Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because he was in
the American army during the war." As our credulity switched back to
her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometimes when
he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man."
She narrowed
her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked
around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he
inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little
that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.(48)
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Luckily Nick runs into Jordan Baker again. Describe the
quartet from East Egg with whom she has come? (Jump ahead a bit:
what does Nick like about her? see pp. 63-64)
When we were
on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in
the rain with the top down, and then lied about it--and suddenly I
remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at
Daisy's. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly
reached the newspapers--a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a
bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions
of a scandal--then died away. A caddy retracted his statement, and the
only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The
incident and the name had remained together in my mind.
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw
that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence
from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest.
She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this
unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she
was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the
world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.
It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never
blame deeply--I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. (62-63) |
Who typically shows up at these parties, East
Eggers? Past midnight the party gets out of control. For Nick the scene
turns into "something significant elemental and profound"(51) What does
he mean?
| By midnight
the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and
a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people
were doing "stunts." all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts
of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage
twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in
costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls.
The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of
silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the
banjoes on the lawn. (51) |
How does Nick finally meet Gatsby? What is his first impression
of the man?
| Gatsby has been sitting at Nick's table and
watching the scene for some time before he speaks to Nick directly. He
asks him about his war service and then finally reveals his identity,
apologizing for his rudeness with a smile and the affectionate term,
"Old Sport."
He smiled
understandingly--much more than understandingly. 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 so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you
would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had
precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to
convey. Precisely at that point it vanished--and I was looking at an
elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate
formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he
introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care. (52-53)
Nick is amazed and wonders at Gatsby's history: "young men didn't--at least in my provincial
inexperience I believed they didn't--drift coolly out of nowhere and
buy a palace on Long Island Sound." (54)
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What does Nick find out has happened in the
driveway when the party finally breaks up? Just another debauched detail?
In the ditch
beside the road, right side up, but violently shorn of one wheel,
rested a new coupe which had left Gatsby's drive not two minutes
before....Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale, dangling
individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the ground
with a large uncertain dancing shoe. (58)
Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant
groaning of the horns, the apparition stood swaying for a moment before
he perceived the man in the duster.
"Wha's matter?"
he inquired calmly. "Did we run outa gas?"
"Look!"
Half a dozen
fingers pointed at the amputated wheel--he stared at it for a moment,
and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from
the sky.
"It came off," some one explained.
He nodded.
"At first I din' notice we'd stopped." (59-60)
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