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.
Chapter 7 · Narrator
Context
The narrative shifts to Michaelis's eyewitness account of Myrtle's death. He describes the car that struck her emerging from the darkness, hesitating momentarily, and then vanishing—a description corroborated at the inquest.
Analysis
The phrase 'death car' in quotation marks distances Nick from tabloid language while simultaneously allowing its symbolic resonance: the car becomes an agent of death rather than a vehicle driven by a specific person, which both reflects the public's mythologization of the event and obscures Daisy's culpability. The verb 'wavered' is the passage's crucial detail—it corresponds to Gatsby's later account of Daisy swerving toward and then away from Myrtle—embedding the truth of the accident in a word that reads as atmospheric description but is actually forensic evidence.
How to Use in Essay
Useful for essays on how the novel obscures responsibility for Myrtle's death through narrative layering, or for analyzing how automobiles function as symbols of careless wealth and its destructive power throughout the text.