The Great Gatsby
Scene #5 · Chapter 5
Gatsby nervously reunites with Daisy at Nick's cottage, initially awkward and almost knocking over a clock. He then leads Daisy and Nick through his mansion, desperately displaying his wealth room by room. In his bedroom, Gatsby pulls out piles of expensive shirts—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange—and throws them into a heap. Daisy bends her head into the shirts and begins to cry, sobbing that she's never seen such beautiful shirts before.
Daisy's tears reveal that she mourns the life she might have had with Gatsby, though her focus on material objects suggests she cannot separate love from wealth. Gatsby's frantic display demonstrates his belief that accumulating possessions can erase the past five years and his lower-class origins. The scene marks the apparent achievement of Gatsby's dream, yet the emphasis on things rather than genuine emotion foreshadows the dream's hollowness.
"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before."
Chapter 5 · Daisy Buchanan
He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real.
Chapter 5 · Narrator
He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an over-wound clock.
Chapter 5 · Narrator
"It took me just three years to earn the money that bought it."
Chapter 5 · Jay Gatsby