The Great Gatsby reading journal: Chapter 2

Chapter two; In which Nick goes to New York with Tom and meets Myrtle Wilson

Reader's thoughts: "Why would Tom Buchanan, a millionare with a wife and a child, have an affair with a poor garage owner's wife?"

References to death:

• Mr Wilson owns a "shaddow of a garage"
• Some of the nerves in Myrtle Wilson's body "were continually smouldering"
• Mrs Wilson walks through her husband as if he were a "ghost"
• Mr Wilson is described by Tom as being "so dumb he doesn't know he's ALIVE"
• The photograph on Tom and Myrtle's apartment wall "hovered like ectoplasm"
• Myrtle lives in "The ash heaps" when people are cremated, they turn into ash.

Other important points:

• Despite insisting in the first chapter that "reserving judgements is a matter of infinate hope", Nick's descriptions of Myrtle reserves nothing. When Nick first sees her, she has a "thickish figure" that "blocked out the light of the office door". In "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck, when Culey's Wife is first seen blocking out the light and at the end of the book, her death gets a man shot. Hmm...
• Nick picks out the superficial things in this chapter as opposed to the dramatic stuff as if to emphasise that dramatic stuff. For example, 31 lines are spent with Myrtle buying a dog that isn't meantioned again after chapter two, whereas 2 lines are spent on Tom breaking Myrtle's nose.
• Despite being "cruel" Tom is never meantioned as being in the war.

Something to remember:

• There is a big contrast between Gatsby and Tom! Gatsby is a self-made man but Tom was born rich ect...