Although the reader is able to perceive this degradation,
Gatsby is not. For him, losing Daisy is like losing his entire world.
He has longed to re-create his past with her and is now forced to
talk to Nick about it in a desperate attempt to keep it alive. Even
after the confrontation with Tom, Gatsby is unable to accept that
his dream is dead. Though Nick implicitly understands that Daisy
is not going to leave Tom for Gatsby under any circumstance, Gatsby
continues to insist that she will call him.
Throughout this chapter, the narrative implicitly establishes
a connection between the weather and the emotional atmosphere of the
story. Just as the geographical settings of the book correspond
to particular characters and themes, the weather corresponds to
the plot. In the previous chapter, Gatsby’s tension-filled confrontation with
Tom took place on the hottest day of the summer, beneath a fiery
and intense sun. Now that the fire has gone out of Gatsby’s life with
Daisy’s decision to remain with Tom, the weather suddenly cools,
and autumn creeps into the air—the gardener even wants to drain
the pool to keep falling leaves from clogging the drains. In the same
way that he clings to the hope of making Daisy love him the way
she used to, he insists on swimming in the pool as though it were
still summer. Both his downfall in Chapter 7 and his death in Chapter 8
result from his stark refusal to accept what he cannot control:
the passage of time.
Gatsby has made Daisy a symbol of everything he values,
and made the green light on her dock a symbol of his destiny with
her. Thinking about Gatsby’s death, Nick suggests that all symbols
are created by the mind—they do not possess any inherent meaning; rather,
people invest them with meaning. Nick writes that Gatsby must have
realized “what a grotesque thing a rose is.” The rose has been a
conventional symbol of beauty throughout centuries of poetry. Nick
suggests that roses aren’t inherently beautiful, and that people
only view them that way because they choose to do so. Daisy is “grotesque”
in the same way: Gatsby has invested her with beauty and meaning
by making her the object of his dream. Had Gatsby not imbued her
with such value, Daisy would be simply an idle, bored, rich young
woman with no particular moral strength or loyalty.
Likewise, though they suggest divine scrutiny both to
the reader and to Wilson, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are
disturbing in part because they are not the eyes of God. They have
no precise, fixed meaning. George Wilson takes Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s
eyes for the all-seeing eyes of God and derives his misguided belief
that Myrtle’s killer must have been her lover from that inference. George’s
assertion that the eyes represent a moral standard, the upholding
of which means that he must avenge Myrtle’s death, becomes a gross
parallel to Nick’s desire to find a moral center in his life. The
eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg can mean anything a character or
reader wants them to, but they look down on a world devoid of
meaning, value, and beauty—a world in which dreams are exposed as
illusions, and cruel, unfeeling men such as Tom receive the love
of women longed for by dreamers such as Gatsby and Wilson.
