How we cite the quotes:
Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
| Quote #1 I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupe with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. (7.307-309) |
Nick only fears growing older because he sees isolation in old age.
| Quote #2 A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing, and I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did Gatsby’s father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister glanced several times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came. (9.113) |
That Gatsby is alone in death has a profound effect upon Nick; this is why Gatsby’s death bothers him so – it confirms his fears of his own eventual isolation.
| Quote #3 "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said she was born. Would you like to hear?"
"Very much."
"It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about – things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’" (1.116-118) |
Daisy is virtually alone – nurses are present, but Tom is not – when she gives birth to her daughter. Clearly she feels very isolated from Tom at this point in their marriage, and hopes that her daughter never has to feel the same way.
