The Great Gatsby

1
The Great Gatsby

• Chapter Five

2
Consider the following

• Understand the importance of rain in this chapter
  and how it is a metaphor for emotional release
• Think about the relationship between Daisy and
  Gatsby and how this is portrayed by Fitzgerald
• Identify Gatsbys anti-climactic feelings towards
  Daisy

3
Chapter Summary

• Nick organises a meeting at his house between
  Gatsby and Daisy
• Alone with Nick, Gatsby discloses that the money
  which bought his mansion was made in just three
  years
• Gatsby gives them a guided tour of his house,
  displaying his possessions, especially his
  expensive, imported clothes
• Nick muses on the nature of Gatsby's desire for
  this woman, and remarks on the intensity of their
  relationship, eventually he leaves them alone

4
Gatsbys Blazing House THINK/PAIR/SHARE

• Gatsby leaves all the lights on in his house,
  even when there are no partygoers to admire it.
• THINK about why he does this, what is the
  point?
• PAIR discuss your ideas with your partner.
• SHARE as a group, create a list of reasons
  which would explain this blazing house.

5
Gatsbys Blazing House

• Perhaps he wishes his house to be a beacon of
  light to Daisy, in the same way that her green
  dock light is a source of spiritual satisfaction
  to him.
• He seems like a man who is afraid of the dark
  or of the ghostliness that comes from an empty
  house.
• For Gatsby, the show of his home must go on to
  face off the darkness troubling him.
• His life is essentially empty notice how he
  talks about glancing into some of the rooms in
  his house, as if checking to see that everything
  is perfect.
• His home is a showpiece, an emblem of spiritual
  death.

6
Gatsby and Daisy are reunited

• It rains throughout chapter 5 (and throughout
  chapter 8). The connections between these two
  chapters become clearer towards the end of the
  novel.
• Rain is a striking metaphor for spiritual release
  and this chapter is full of examples of this.

7
TASK

• Depending on your number, you will either be
  working on
• Identifying when it rains in this chapter and how
  this connects to Gatsbys feelings at that time.
• OR
• Describing the relationship between Gatsby and
  Daisy and how it develops in this chapter.

8
TASK

• Regardless of what task you have been given, you
  must create a detailed explanation and include
  key quotations, detailed analysis and your own
  personal opinions.
• You will then make a date with someone else in
  the room who has the OPPOSITE task and you must
  explain your ideas to them.
• You will then make second date with another pair
  and discuss your ideas on both aspects in order
  to present your interpretations to the rest of
  the class.

9
Rain and Gatsby's Relationship with Daisy

• At 4pm, when Daisy arrives, the rain has cooled
  to a damp mist. The connections of cool and
  damp to Daisys character are clear from the
  previous chapter, where we learned that her
  feelings for Gatsby faded as his letter became a
  damp pulp.
• At the height of Gatsbys discomfort when Nick
  finds the tensions too unbearable to remain
  indoors it is again pouring.
• When Nick returns, Daisy and Gatsby have happily
  reacquainted. Significantly, the sun shone
  again, there are twinkle bells of sunshine in
  the room and Gatsby is again an ecstatic patron
  of recurring light.

10
Rain and Gatsby's Relationship with Daisy

• As Gatsby falls into an anti-climax, Daisy begins
  to cry. The introduction of the symbol of
  Gatsbys shirts is very important here. Daisy
  breaks down at the sight of Gatsby throwing
  almost obsessively his shirts onto his bed.

11
Rain and Gatsby's Relationship with Daisy

• He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing
  them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer
  linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost
  their folds as they fell and covered the table in
  a many-coloured disarray. While we admired he
  brought more and the soft rich heap mounted
  higher shirts with stripes and scrolls and
  plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and
  faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue.
  Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her
  head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

12
Rain and Gatsby's Relationship with Daisy

• Daisys moment of release when the soft rich
  heap dumbfounds her occurs at a moment of
  simultaneous wonder and disappointment. Gatsby
  is, by now, running down like an over wound
  clock, a result of having spent so many years
  obsessing over Daisy at an inconceivable pitch
  of intensity. His rather bewildered sense of
  sadness and anti-climax combines with Daisys
  sense of wonder and awe at the spectacle of
  social status laid out before her. Like the time
  she was dog-chained by Tom's status symbol (the
  pearls) she reacts to Gatsby's shirts with tears.
  The curious mixture of happiness and tears
  (sunshine and rain) provides a rainbow depicted
  by the multicoloured array of shirts on the bed.

13
Gatsby's Relationship with Daisy

• The episode in which Gatsby and Daisy are
  reunited in his mansion is clearly a highly
  significant one. It is an encounter that carries
  an enormous amount of weight in the novel and,
  discloses to us that Daisy falls terribly short
  of the ideal version lodged in Gatsby's heart and
  imagination.
• It might seem obvious that Gatsby and Daisy have
  a lot of catching up to do, and would feel the
  need to talk at length, yet dialogue is kept to a
  minimum. Their feelings for one and other are
  communicated through their actions and through
  what remains unsaid.

14
TASK

• You should now all be able to chart the change
  and development of Gatsbys feelings towards
  Daisy but now we will focus on his anti-climatic
  feelings for Daisy at the end of the chapter.
• In groups, write a detailed description of how
  Gatsby feels about Daisy at the end of this
  chapter. Refer to key quotations and remember to
  give your own opinions.

15
Gatsbys Anti-Climax

• We get the feeling in this chapter that, despite
  Gatsbys sense of wonder and awe at Daisy's
  presence, he nonetheless experiences an unusual
  sense of emptiness and disappointment.
• Nick makes particular reference to the light at
  the end of Daisy's dock, the colossal
  significance, of which, has now vanished
  forever.
• For Gatsby, that light had been a tantalising,
  spiritual beacon to light his way to Daisy, now
  that he is within his grasp, it has reverted back
  to the ordinary.

16
Gatsbys Anti-Climax

• Gatsby seems to revel in the electric intensity
  of reaching for an object more than grasping it
• I saw that the faint expression of bewilderment
  had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a
  faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality
  of his present happiness. Five years! There just
  have been moments even on that afternoon when
  Daisy stumbled short of his dreams not through
  her fault, but because of the colossal vitality
  of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond
  everything. No amount of fire or freshness can
  challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly
  heart.
• The trajectory of Gatsby's dream is such that the
  object of that dream Daisy falls short. This
  is part of Gatsby's tragedy pursuing a dream
  that he, himself, has made unattainable.

17
The Clock

• Gatsby himself is referred to as an over wound
  clock in this chapter, which ties him
  perceptibly to the idea of the passing of time.
  When he enters Nicks house, he behaves very like
  a wooden stiff actor, full of unrealistic gesture
  and poses
• in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease his
  head leaned back so far that it rested against
  the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock, and from
  this position his distraught eyes stared down..
• The deliberate use of negative adjectives to
  describe these clocks defunct and over
  wound reinforce the idea that Gatsby has a
  skewed and unrealistic idea of time itself. For
  him, time must have stopped and rewound to the
  point where he lost Daisy to Tom Buchanan.