The Great Gatsby

								
Once again
                                  to
                                 Zelda

  Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
  If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
  Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
  I must have you!”

  Thomas Parke d’Invilliers


                                  I

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice
that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just
remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages
that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative
in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more
than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a
habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me
the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to
detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal
person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of
being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,
unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have
feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by
some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on
the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least
the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and
marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of
infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I
forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly
repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out
unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission
that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the
wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded
on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted
the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I
wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the
human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was
exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I
have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of
successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some
heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related
to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten
thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that
flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the
“creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a
romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and
which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out
all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust
floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my
interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle
Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a
clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of
Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s
brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil
War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father
carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with
special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in
father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of
a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that
delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the
counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being
the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the
ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond
business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it
could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it
over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said,
“Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance
me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I
thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm
season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly
trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a
house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He
found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a
month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and
I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a
few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who
made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to
herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more
recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide,
a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the
freedom of the neighbourhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the
trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar
conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to
be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen
volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they
stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint,

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