The day, it turns out, is unbearably hot, making all the participants in the luncheon — Daisy, Gatsby, Nick, Jordan, and Tom — even more uncomfortable than expected. While all five are at the Buchanans' house, Tom leaves the room to speak with his mistress on the phone and Daisy boldly kisses Gatsby, declaring her love for him. Later, after Daisy suggests they go to town, Tom witnesses a soft glance that passes between Daisy and Gatsby and can no longer deny the two of them are having an affair.
Enraged by what he has just learned, Tom agrees they should go to the city. Tom, it turns out, has been suspicious of Gatsby all along and has had him investigated. Noticing the car is low on gas, Tom pulls into Wilson's station where he finds Wilson visibly unwell. Wilson abruptly announces he and Myrtle will be headed West shortly because he has just learned of her secret life, although the identity of Myrtle's lover is yet unknown to him.
Tom, doubly enraged at the potential loss of his mistress and his wife, malevolently questions Gatsby after the group assembles at the Plaza Hotel. He confronts Gatsby about his love for Daisy. Gatsby, refusing to be intimidated, tells Tom "Your wife doesn't love you. She's never loved you. She loves me. Daisy, however, cannot honestly admit she never loved Tom. Gatsby, somewhat shaken by the scene unfolding before him — the collapse of his carefully constructed dream — tries another tactic.
He declares: "Daisy's leaving you. Tom orders Daisy and Gatsby to head home in Gatsby's own car this time. Tom, Jordan, and Nick follow in Tom's car. The narration now skips to George Wilson who has been found ill by his neighbor, Michaelis. Wilson explains he has Myrtle locked inside and she will remain so until they leave in two days' time. Michaelis, astonished, heads back to his restaurant. He returns a few hours later, hears Myrtle's voice, and then sees her break away from her husband and rush into the road.
As she enters the highway Myrtle is struck by a passing car that fails to stop, continuing its route out of the city. Nick, Tom, and Jordan arrive on the scene shortly. Excited by the thought of something going on, Tom pulls over to investigate. He is grief-stricken to find Myrtle's lifeless body lying on a worktable.
Tom learns the car that struck Myrtle matches Gatsby's in description. Tom, visibly upset by the day's events, can only whimper of his anger toward the man he already hates. Returning to East Egg, Tom invites Nick inside to wait for a cab to take him home. Nick, seeing clearly the moral and spiritual corruption of Tom, Daisy, and the whole society they represent, declines. Outside the Buchanans', Nick bumps into Gatsby who asks if there was trouble on the road.
Nick recounts what he has seen. Daisy didn't understand why he didn't return directly and, over time, her interest began to wane until she eventually broke off their relationship. Moving back to the present, Gatsby and Nick continue their discussion of Daisy and how Gatsby had gone to Louisville to find her upon his return to the United States.
She was on her honeymoon and Gatsby was left with a "melancholy beauty," as well as the idea that if he had only searched harder he would have found her. The men are finishing breakfast as Gatsby's gardener arrives. He says he plans on draining the pool because the season is over, but Gatsby asks him to wait because he hasn't used the pool at all. Nick, purposely moving slowly, heads to his train. He doesn't want to leave Gatsby, impulsively declaring "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.
For Nick, the day drags on; he feels uneasy, preoccupied with the past day's adventures. Jordan phones, but Nick cuts her off.
He phones Gatsby and, unable to reach him, decides to head home early. The narrative again shifts time and focus, as Fitzgerald goes back in time, to the evening prior, in the valley of ashes. George Wilson, despondent at Myrtle's death, appears irrational when Michaelis attempts to engage him in conversation. By morning, Michaelis is exhausted and returns home to sleep.
There he finds Gatsby floating on an air mattress in the pool. Wilson, sure that Gatsby is responsible for his wife's death, shoots and kills Gatsby. Nick finds Gatsby's body floating in the pool and, while starting to the house with the body, the gardener discovers Wilson's lifeless body off in the grass.
Chapter 8 displays the tragic side of the American dream as Gatsby is gunned down by George Wilson. The death is brutal, if not unexpected, and brings to an end the life of the paragon of idealism. The myth of Gatsby will continue, thanks to Nick who relays the story, but Gatsby's death loudly marks the end of an era. In many senses, Gatsby is the dreamer inside all of everyone.
Although the reader cheers him as he pursues his dreams, one also knows that pure idealism cannot survive in the harsh modern world. This chapter, as well as the one following, also provides astute commentary on the world that, in effect, allowed the death of Gatsby.
As the chapter opens, Nick is struggling with the situation at hand. He grapples with what's right and what's wrong, which humanizes him and lifts him above the rigid callousness of the story's other characters. Unable to sleep a premonition of bad things to come he heads to Gatsby's who is returning from his all-night vigil outside Daisy's house.
He says that Gatsby deserved to die. Nick comes to the conclusion that Tom and Daisy are careless and uncaring people and that they destroy people and things, knowing that their money will shield them from ever having to face any negative consequences. Nick muses that, in some ways, this story is a story of the West, even though it has taken place entirely on the East Coast. Nick, Jordan, Tom, and Daisy are all from west of the Appalachians, and Nick believes that the reactions of each, himself included, to living the fast-paced, lurid lifestyle of the East has shaped his or her behavior.
Nick remembers life in the Midwest, full of snow, trains, and Christmas wreaths, and thinks that the East seems grotesque and distorted by comparison. As the moon rises, he imagines the island with no houses and considers what it must have looked like to the explorers who discovered the New World centuries before.
Nick imagines that America was once a goal for dreamers and explorers, just as Daisy was for Gatsby. Nick senses that people everywhere are motivated by similar dreams and by a desire to move forward into a future in which their dreams are realized.
Nick envisions their struggles to create that future as boats moving in a body of water against a current that inevitably carries them back into the past. 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. Nick thinks of America not just as a nation but as a geographical entity, land with distinct regions embodying contrasting sets of values.
Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete. Nick is happy whenever he gets to demonstrate how undereducated and dumb Tom actually is. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!
Gatsby throws caution to the wind and reveals the story that he has been telling himself about Daisy all this time. In his mind, Daisy has been pining for him as much as he has been longing for her, and he has been able to explain her marriage to himself simply by eliding any notion that she might have her own hopes, dreams, ambitions, and motivations.
Gatsby has been propelled for the last five years by the idea that he has access to what is in Daisy's heart. However, we can see that a dream built on this kind of shifting sand is at best wishful thinking and at worst willful self-delusion. Just tell him the truth—that you never loved him—and it's all wiped out forever. She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all.
But it was done now. It was too late…. I can't help what's past. Gatsby wants nothing less than that Daisy erase the last five years of her life. He is unwilling to accept the idea that Daisy has had feelings for someone other than him, that she has had a history that does not involve him, and that she has not spent every single second of every day wondering when he would come back into her life.
His absolutism is a form of emotional blackmail. For all Daisy's evident weaknesses, it is a testament to her psychological strength that she is simply unwilling to recreate herself, her memories, and her emotions in Gatsby's image. She could easily at this point say that she has never loved Tom, but this would not be true, and she does not want to give up her independence of mind. Unlike Gatsby, who against all evidence to the contrary believes that you can repeat the past, Daisy wants to know that there is a future.
She wants Gatsby to be the solution to her worries about each successive future day, rather than an imprecation about the choices she has made to get to this point. We've known this ever since the first time we saw them at the end of Chapter 1 , when he realized that they were cemented together in their dysfunction. It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made.
But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.
In just the same way, Tom's explanations about who Gatsby really is and what is behind his facade have broken Daisy's infatuation. Take note of the language here— as Daisy is withdrawing from Gatsby, we come back to the image of Gatsby with his arms outstretched, trying to grab something that is just out of reach.
In this case it's not just Daisy herself, but also his dream of being with her inside his perfect memory. Myrtle fights by provoking and taunting. So what do we make of the fact that Myrtle was trying to verbally emasculate her husband? Maybe yelling at him is her only recourse in a life where she has no actual ability to control her life or bodily integrity.
The "death car" as the newspapers called it, didn't stop; it came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then disappeared around the next bend.
Michaelis wasn't even sure of its color—he told the first policeman that it was light green. The other car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark blood with the dust.
Michaelis and this man reached her first but when they had torn open her shirtwaist still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath.
The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long. The stark contrast here between the oddly ghostly nature of the car that hits Myrtle and the visceral, gruesome, explicit imagery of what happens to her body after it is hit is very striking.
On the other hand, every time that we see Myrtle in the novel, her body is physically assaulted or appropriated. Tom initially picks her up by pressing his body inappropriately into hers on the train station platform. Before her party, Tom has sex with her while Nick a man who is a stranger to Myrtle waits in the next room, and then Tom ends the night by punching her in the face.
Finally, she is restrained by her husband inside her house and then run over. Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own.
Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement. They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren't unhappy either.
There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together. And so, the promise that Daisy and Tom are a dysfunctional couple that somehow makes it work Nick saw this at the end of Chapter 1 is fulfilled. For careful readers of the novel, this conclusion should have been clear from the get-go.
Daisy complains about Tom, and Tom serially cheats on Daisy, but at the end of the day, they are unwilling to forgo the privileges their life entitles them to. This moment of truth has stripped Daisy and Tom down to the basics. They are in the least showy room of their mansion, sitting with simple and unpretentious food, and they have been stripped of their veneer.
Their honesty makes what they are doing—conspiring to get away with murder, basically—completely transparent. And it is the fact that they can tolerate this level of honesty in each other besides each being kind of a terrible person that keeps them together. Compare their readiness to forgive each other anything—even murder!
The image of Tom and Daisy holding hands, while discussing how to flee after Daisy kills Myrtle, is the crux of their relationship. They are willing to forgive each other everything. Are they secretly the most romantic couple in the book? It's no surprise that this very long, emotional, and shocking chapter is laced through with the themes of The Great Gatsby. Let's take a look.
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