The Great Gatsby

1. The Great Gatsby Chapter Five

2. Learning Intentions • 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 Gatsby’s 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. Gatsby’s 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.

5. 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 Daisy’s 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 Gatsby’s 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’.

6. Rain and Gatsby's Relationship with Daisy • As Gatsby falls into an anti-climax, Daisy begins to cry. The introduction of the symbol of Gatsby’s shirts is very important here. Daisy breaks down at the sight of Gatsby throwing – almost obsessively – his shirts onto his bed.

7. 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.

8. Rain and Gatsby's Relationship with Daisy • Daisy’s 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 Daisy’s 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.

9. 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.

10. Gatsby’s Anti-Climax • We get the feeling in this chapter that, despite Gatsby’s 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.

11. Gatsby’s 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.

12. 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 Nick’s 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.