I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already too far away, and I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower.
Chapter 9 · Narrator
Context
At Gatsby's graveside, during the sparsely attended funeral in the rain, Nick attempts to focus his thoughts on the dead man but finds that Gatsby has already become abstract—too distant to mourn concretely. His mind drifts instead to Daisy's complete absence from any gesture of remembrance.
Analysis
The phrase 'without resentment' is more damning than anger would be—Nick has moved past outrage into a resigned acceptance of Daisy's nature that renders her not villainous but simply inadequate, someone whose moral limitations are as fixed as a natural law. The observation that Gatsby is 'already too far away' reveals that death creates an immediate and unbridgeable distance, making the elegy Nick will eventually write an attempt to close a gap that opened the instant Gatsby died—the narrative is fundamentally an act of retrieval against the erasure of death and indifference.
How to Use in Essay
Effective for essays on Daisy's ultimate failure as the object of Gatsby's devotion, or for analyzing how the novel presents mourning as inseparable from moral judgment—Nick cannot think of Gatsby without also thinking of those who failed him.