Chapter 6

Summary Nick reveals more about Gatsby’s past, his humble origins and his time with Dan Cody. The Buchanans attend one of Gatsby’s parties, and the growing tension between Tom and Gatsby is obvious.

Nick has not seen his neighbor in several weeks because Gatsby is devoting his time to Daisy, and Nick has been involved with Jordan. As a result, Nick decides to go over and check on Gatsby one Sunday afternoon. He has not been in Gatsby's mansion for two minutes when a party of three horseback riders stops for a drink.

The Party Daisy and Gatsby danced. I remember being surprised by his graceful, conservative fox-trot - I had never seen him dance before. Then they went to Nick’s house and sat on the steps for half an hour. Nick “remained watchfully in the garden. “In case there's a fire or a flood,” she explained, “or any act of God.”

The Party Continues Daisy tries to be excited about the party-goers and involved in the festivities, but everything about the party offends her. The women are inebriated and acting poorly, and Tom is chasing a girl who is “common but pretty.” Gatsby introduces Tom as the polo player…. And Tom does not like it.

After the Party Gatsby asks Nick to stay after the other guests have left. Nick immediately notices that his neighbor's eyes look tired and that his face is drawn tight. He is the picture of misery. Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy did not enjoy the party, that she does not understand him, and that he feels far away from her.

Jay Gatsby His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people from North Dakota. Even as a boy, he dreamed of a better life. At age sixteen, he set off to make his own way as a clam digger and salmon fisherman on the shore of Lake Superior. Nick introduces more details to form a picture of Gatsby’s past. His original name was James Gatz which he changed when he was seventeen to the more glamorous Jay Gatsby. He came from North Dakota, a state on the border with Canada and situated midway between the East and West Coasts of America.

His real break with the past came when Dan Cody moored his yacht in the shallows of Lake Superior, and Gatz warned him of possible danger from high wind. It was at this point that the new name came into being, to match the beauty and glamour which Cody’s yacht represented to him. Gatsby was rewarded with an education in the ways of the world from this opportunist millionaire, ‘a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five’.

Nick discusses the act of self-creation that produced the man he calls ‘The Great Gatsby’. This idealistic act contrasts the insistent greed of Cody, who yet became Gatsby’s ‘destiny’. During his five years as Cody’s assistant, Gatsby sailed three times around the American continent. Then Cody died. Gatsby’s inheritance was not the twenty five thousand dollars Cody intended he should inherit but a “singularly appropriate education”. Nick believes this to be the truth.

Dan Cody Dan Cody was fifty years old Worth millions due to his Montana copper mining venture. With vast wealth and no purpose, he became a drifter, drinker, and womanizer, sometimes prone to violence.

Ella Kaye Ella Kaye was newspaper woman involved with Dan Cody. Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody died.

Inheritance Lost And it was from Cody that he inherited money A legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn't get it. He never understood the legal device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye.

Tom Buchanan He then reports an occasion when Tom was brought as a guest to Gatsby’s mansion. Gatsby told Tom that he knew his wife. Tom’s response was to make the edgy remark: “I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me”. This suggests Tom’s view of women as being objects .

Theme – Relationship of Past with Present Gatsby wants Daisy to leave her husband for him and to tell Tom that she never loved him. Nick warns, “You can’t repeat the past”; but Gatsby replies, “Why of course you can!” showing an ability to fool himself matching his endless capacity for hope. Jay Gatsby’s ideal future is the return of a golden moment from his past, rather than something truly new and unprecedented. Compare the claims made by early American settlers that their new world offered the opportunity to return to the Garden of Eden. The tradition itself goes back a long way.

Theme – perception v. Reality F. Scott Fitzgerald here picks up the concern with capacity for wonder introduced in the previous chapter. Here he makes explicit the childlike quality of innocent vision which must accompany it. In Gatsby’s eyes the city streets become trees, transformed into a green world by means of imagination and intense feeling. Gatsby feels he can climb those trees, and at their top he can “suck on the pap of life and gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder”. The nurturing breast that is figured here as “the pap of life” is echoed at the end of the book in the image of the “fresh green breast of the new world”. In between these moments of vision, one of Myrtle Wilson’s breasts is mutilated in an automobile accident. F. Scott Fitzgerald contrasts the capacity of metaphor to create a visionary reality with a brutal physical reality that constantly threatens to undermine the power of the vision. The possibility of sustaining a vision that might redeem the world from cruelty and suffering is a major concern in narrative.

Gatsby’s Dream He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house – just as if it were five years ago.

Magic and illusion Gatsby has transformed himself from a humble Midwestern boy to an East Coast celebrity. He has also transformed Daisy Fay, within his own imagination, from a Southern girl to an ideal radiant life and beauty. The novel is packed with references to magic and to enchantment, and, at least within the confines of his own mind, ‘The Great Gatsby’ is an accomplished magician. The phase ‘The Great Gatsby’ carries a suggestion of the showmanship of stage magicians, who practise an art of illusion and use such names to advertise their performances.

Dan Cody, Gatsby’s mentor, transformed himself into a millionaire, but underneath the veneer of material success he remained “the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloons”. F. Scott Fitzgerald is here deflating an idealised version of pioneer life, characterised by heroism and high mindedness. Just as Gatsby casts his world in a romantic light, so America has imagined its Western past in elevated terms. That illusion is dispelled with the honest look at Cody. The satirist Mark Twain had earlier produced a much fuller deflation of the prospecting life of the American West in Roughing It, a work which F. Scott Fitzgerald knew well. There is ambivalence in F. Scott Fitzgerald's attitude towards imagination: it can be seen to work magic and make ordinary life seem enchanted; or it can be seen to generate illusions that keep harsh realities out of focus and help perpetuate injustices

Theme – social class Gatsby asks the three visitors to stay for dinner. The female rider suggests, out of politeness, that Gatsby come to supper with them. Gatsby does not realise that she doesn’t mean it, and he goes off to change for the dinner party. Tom remarks, “My God, I believe the man's coming. Doesn't he know she doesn't want him?” Tom immediately recognises Gatsby's lack of class and wonders how in the world Daisy knows him. When Gatsby returns downstairs, he discovers he has been left behind.