She's a cheat. And Nick describes her as not just a golf cheat, but a cheat at life:. 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.
Let's break this down: she's dishonest, hard, cool, insolent, and deceptive. Oh, and her body has " demands," which, to us, sounds a lot like sex. Golf, sex, and dishonesty: Jordan may come from the same world as Daisy, but she's a modern woman, with "slender golden arm[s]" 3. Golden arms?
Code for tan. Code for not white. Do you object to shaking hands with me? You know what I think of you. This quotation emphasizes the grotesque and often distorted morals of the wealthy who, instead of facing the consequences that result from their actions, choose to hide behind a shield of money.
As a result the wealthy seem to lack a sense of guilt for their reckless behavior and thus, Fitzgerald utilizes this quotation to reveal the distorted moral standards that come with money and wealth. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. Nick knows that such associations are merely fanciful. Unlike Leatherstocking, he has no frontier to which he can retreat.
Unlike Columbus, there are no new Edens he can find. In contrast to Whitman, who eventually merges with the lives of those he observes, Nick decides to move out of the game altogether.
He does so, even though he is aware of the cost. Even with his understanding of the dangers of indifference and moral apathy, even with his insights into the complexities of life, Nick makes a series of choices which essentially negate his consciousness. For example, he will, as he had in college, refuse intimacy with others. To make such choices, Nick oversimplifies the complexities of what he knows and overlooks the contradictions in his thought.
He no longer wants his angle of vision threatened by any other perspective. Thus he will even deny what he has most learned from watching Gatsby. He overlooks the fact that he is embracing illusions he knows are empty and instead portrays his return to the Midwest as exiling himself from a corrupt East.
He retreats from involvement with other people but continues to see himself as a mature, responsible adult, as the one who cleans up messes and erases obscene remarks on sidewalks. But most significantly, Nick, to some extent, negates his criticism and his analysis of contemporary America. Instead of confronting the implications of these lessons, Nick does the opposite and justifies that as well.
He does not argue that individuals should make judgments and act on them. Such a reading, however, offers a fairly bleak vision. Only the unreliable Jordan is critical of his carelessness. At the same time, as Matthew J. There is evidence that during the decade following the publication of The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald began to confront more directly the issues which the novel raised but did not resolve.
In addition, Nick has the distinct honor of being the only character who changes substantially from the story's beginning to its end. Nick, although he initially seems outside the action, slowly moves to the forefront, becoming an important vehicle for the novel's messages. On one level, Nick is Fitzgerald's Everyman, yet in many ways he is much more. He comes from a fairly nondescript background.
He hails from the upper Midwest Minnesota or Wisconsin and has supposedly been raised on stereotypical Midwestern values hard work, perseverance, justice, and so on. He is a little more complex than that, however.
His family, although descended from the "Dukes of Buccleuch," really started when Nick's grandfather's brother came to the U. By the time the story takes place, the Carraways have only been in this country for a little over seventy years — not long, in the great scope of things.
In addition, the family patriarch didn't exhibit the good Midwestern values Nick sees in himself. When the civil war began, Nick's relative "sent a substitute" to fight for him, while he started the family business.
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