The Great Gatsby
Scene #9 · Chapter 8
George Wilson, driven mad by grief and Tom's misdirection, arrives at Gatsby's mansion believing Gatsby killed Myrtle. Gatsby floats on a pneumatic mattress in his pool, having waited all morning for Daisy's phone call that never came. Wilson shoots Gatsby in the water, and the mattress drifts with Gatsby's body, tracing a pattern of red in the pool. Wilson then shoots himself. Nick, returning to the house, finds Gatsby's body and realizes that Gatsby died still believing in his dream, never knowing that Daisy had betrayed him.
Gatsby dies waiting for Daisy, killed because of her actions but taking the blame to the end, which underscores the complete one-sidedness of his devotion. The timing of his death—his first swim of the summer, his first moment of giving up the vigil—suggests that letting go of the dream, even momentarily, proves fatal. Wilson, another victim of the careless rich, becomes the instrument of their escape, as Tom has redirected Wilson's rage away from himself and toward Gatsby.
He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
Chapter 8 · Narrator
I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
Chapter 8 · Narrator
A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water.
Chapter 8 · Narrator
There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool.
Chapter 8 · Narrator
It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.
Chapter 8 · Narrator