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It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes.
As Gatsby describes his initial encounters with Daisy when he was in the army stationed in Louisville, the concept of Daisy’s “value” in Gatsby’s eyes is touched upon. This idea is discussed further in Quotes by Character: Jay Gatsby (the first Chapter 8 quote).
He might have despised himself, for [Gatsby] had certainly taken her under false pretenses . . . he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself—that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities—he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.
Gatsby describes to Nick his initial pursuit of Daisy while he was a soldier stationed near her family home. It was there that the fundamental issue of his being poor and her being accustomed to and expecting of generational family wealth first surfaced.
Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.
As Gatsby continues to describe his romance with Daisy before she was married, we are told that the issue of he and Daisy being from entirely differing and incompatible social strata was always present in his mind.
Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.
Nick describes how Daisy reacted after Gatsby departed for the war, using a musical metaphor that is appropriate for the novel’s Jazz Age setting. This is further discussed in Quotes by Character: Daisy Buchanan (the Chapter 8 quote).
We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around.
‘They're a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.’
In what will be their final encounter, Nick instinctively offers up this praise and support to Gatsby despite the many misgivings he has had about him. This passage is further discussed in Quotes by Character: Nick Carraway (the Chapter 8 quote).
His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye.
After complimenting Gatsby, Nick says goodbye to him for the last time. Of all the people who have encountered Gatsby throughout the course of the novel, only Nick has been able fully understand him—but he’s also probably been the only person who has attempted to do so.
When I passed the ashheaps on the train that morning I had crossed deliberately to the other side of the car.
Nick finds himself unable to even look at the valley of ashes as his train car passes it on the morning after Myrtle is killed. This quote is further discussed in Quotes by Symbol: The Valley of Ashes (the first Chapter 8 quote).
Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small gray clouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.
The mystical qualities of the valley of ashes have a profound effect on George Wilson after Myrtle is killed, as is described more fully in Quotes by Symbol: The Valley of Ashes (the second Chapter 8 quote).
‘You may fool me but you can't fool God!’
Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night.
‘God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson.
After Myrtle Wilson’s death, her husband George describes to his friend Michaelis how he had warned her about the eyes of God, which in his deranged mind have been conflated with the eyes on the Doctor T. J. Eckleburg billboard. This passage is discussed further in Quotes by Symbol: The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg (the Chapter 8 quote).
I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.
This passage discusses Gatsby’s request that his butler listen for a phone call, presumably from Daisy, that will never come. Nick’s suspicion is that by the time he is killed by George Wilson, Gatsby himself had realized that his pursuit of Daisy—which he had devoted years of his life to—was not going to succeed. Read more about the sense of grief and regret in this passage in Quotes by Character: Jay Gatsby (the second Chapter 8 quote).
