4. what is the significance of mr. gatz arrival

This is demonstrated by Nick's physical description of him at the beginning of the chapter: His eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears. Gatz travels from Minnesota to attend his son's funeral and is proud of Jay's financial accomplishments.

Back at the mansion, Mr. Gatz shows Nick a picture of the Gatsby's mansion that Gatsby had sent back home. He also shows him a western that Gatsby had loved to read. Gatz , Jay Gatsby's father, is a flat character, a personage who remains the same throughout the narrative, but he does serve a purpose.

He arrives at Gatsby's house in order to bury his son. Gatz is extremely proud of his son, Jimmy Gatz , as he calls Gatsby. Who killed Gatsby? George Wilson. Why does Nick finally shake hands with Tom? Initially Nick refuses to shake Tom's hand, upset with what Tom has come to represent. When Nick leaves, he shakes Tom's hand because he "felt suddenly as though [he] were talking to a child.

Why didn't wolfsheim attend Gatsby's funeral? When Nick Carraway is trying to get people to attend Gatsby's funeral, one of the people he tries to get is Meyer Wolfsheim.

He calls Wolfsheim's house a bunch of times and gets no answer. The note says that Wolfsheim is too busy to attend. It says he is tied up with some important business.

WHO calls Gatsby before he died? Gatsby's Death and Funeral In both book and movie, Gatsby is waiting for a phone call from Daisy, but in the film, Nick calls, and Gatsby gets out of the pool when he hears the phone ring.

Gatsby was unable to parlay his hospitality into any genuine connection with anyone besides Nick, who seems to have liked him despite the parties rather than because of them. This highlights a clash of values between the new, anything-goes East and the older, more traditionally correct West. The East is a place where someone could come to a party and then insult the host - and then imply that a murdered man had it coming!

Compare this to the moment when Gatsby feels uneasy making a scene when having lunch with Tom and Daisy because "I can't say anything in his house, old sport. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different--if a friend of mine died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that's sentimental but I mean it--to the bitter end…. Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead," he suggested.

He is using this quasi-philosophical excuse in order to protect himself from being anywhere near a crime scene. Part of forgetting the past is forgetting the people that are no longer here, so for Wolfshiem, even a close relationship like the one he had with Gatsby has to immediately be pushed to the side once Gatsby is no longer alive.

I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment but he was already too far away and I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur "Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on," and then the owl-eyed man said "Amen to that," in a brave voice. The theme of forgetting continues here. Perhaps it is this kind of forgetting that allows Nick to think about Daisy without anger.

On the one hand, in order to continue through life, you need to be able to separate yourself from the tragedies that have befallen. When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air.

We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That's my middle west--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name.

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

All along, the novel has juxtaposed the values and attitudes of the rich to those of the lower classes. However here, in this chapter, as Nick is starting to pull away from New York, the contrast shifts to comparing the values of the Midwest to those of the East. Here, the dim lights, the realness, and the snow are natural foils for the bright lights and extremely hot weather associated in the novel with Long Island and the party scene.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

They are people who do not have to answer for their actions and are free to ignore the consequences of what they do. This is one of the ways in which their marriage, dysfunctional as it is, works well. It is interesting to consider how this cycle will perpetuate itself with Pammy, their daughter. On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone.

Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand. His whole project in this book has been to protect Gatsby's reputation and to establish his legacy. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.

And one fine morning Check out our very in-depth analysis of this extremely famous last sentence, last paragraphs, and last section of the book. Think about the amount of effort involved in this process of constantly sailing against the current. Maybe this is the fundamental mismatch between Gatsby and Daisy. She is a creature of passivity, and he is a swan - gliding gracefully above the water, while paddling furiously just below it to stay afloat.

The American Dream. Mutability of Identity. Conversely, the inability to escape the past also plays a part in this chapter, as we learn that for Nick, this has been a story of Midwesterners trying to go east and failing.

Most importantly, the last line of the novel says that despite the fact that we struggle to move upstream, the current of our past is always working against our forward progress. Plot-wise, too, the last chapter is full of callbacks to the past. The story is brought to a close when Nick interacts with two people from his past. First, he speaks with Jordan and, although he still feels fondly toward her, he once again coolly dismisses her. Finally, one autumn day, Nick meets Tom along Fifth Avenue.

Tom, seeing Nick, makes the first move to speak. Initially Nick refuses to shake Tom's hand, upset with what Tom has come to represent. In the course of their short discussion, Nick learns Tom had a role in Gatsby's death — George Wilson worked his way to the Buchanan house in East Egg and Tom told him who owned the car that struck Myrtle. When Nick leaves, he shakes Tom's hand because he "felt suddenly as though [he] were talking to a child.

The time comes for Nick to leave West Egg and return West. On the last night, he wanders over to Gatsby's for one last visit. Strolling down to the water he is called to remember the way Gatsby's house used to be, filled with people and lavish parties. He considers Gatsby's wonder at picking out Daisy's dock in the darkness, how far Gatsby had traveled in his life, and how he always had hope in the future. In his final thought, Nick links society to the boats eternally moving against the current on the Sound.

The last chapter of The Great Gatsby continues a theme begun in the previous chapter, bringing the reader face-to-face with the ugly side of the American dream.

Throughout the story, Gatsby has been held up as an example of one who has achieved the American dream — he had money, possessions, independence, and people who wanted to be around him.

Or so the reader thinks. Gatsby's funeral takes center stage in this chapter, and with the exception of Nick, who continues to show his moral fiber, what Fitzgerald reveals about the moral decrepitude of those people still living is even worse than any of Gatsby's secrets. As the chapter opens, Nick tells readers what an impact this course of events makes upon him.

They came to investigate, and once again, the carnivalesque atmosphere that so often accompanied Gatsby's parties establishes itself. This time, however, the situation is decidedly less merry. Nick, showing he has come to respect Gatsby over the course of the summer, worries that, in fact, the circus-like atmosphere will allow the "grotesque, circumstantial, [and] eager" reporters to mythologize his neighbor, filling the pages of their rags with half-truths and full-blown lies.

For Nick, however, even more disturbing than the free-for-all that surrounds the investigation is the fact that he finds himself "on Gatsby's side, and alone. Nick, by default, assumes the responsibility for making Gatsby's final arrangements, "because no one else was interested — interested. First, the Nick who is blooming at the end of Chapter 7 has come into fruition in this chapter. He is a man of principles and integrity which shows more and more as the chapter unfolds. The second idea introduced here is the utter shallowness of the people who, in better times, take every opportunity to be at Gatsby's house, drinking his liquor, eating his food, and enjoying his hospitality, but abandon him at the end: Daisy and Tom have left without a forwarding address.

Meyer Wolfshiem, who is "completely knocked down and out" at Gatsby's death, and who wants to "know about the funeral etc. Even the partygoers disappear. The party is over, and so they move on to the next event, treating their host with the same respect in death that they gave him in life — none at all. Klipspringer is a shining example of all the partygoers when he phones Gatsby's, speaks to Nick, and sidesteps the issue of Gatsby's funeral, shamelessly admitting, "what I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there.

I'm sort of helpless without them. The callousness of the people who so eagerly took advantage of Gatsby's hospitality is appalling. Certainly the American dream isn't supposed to end like this, gunned down for something you didn't do, utterly forgotten in your death. Fitzgerald does a fine job of displaying the downside to the American dream and how drive and ambition can, in effect, go too far. Dreams are useful, to a point, but when they consume the dreamer, they lead to destruction. In true Fitzgerald fashion, and in keeping with the way he has effectively withheld information regarding Gatsby's past throughout the novel, just when the reader thinks he or she knows all, Gatsby's father arrives and gives yet another peek into Gatsby's past.