In this dialogue, Tom is discussing his true feelings about Gatsby to Nick. He is surprised that his wife knows him. This quote shows that he is very stubborn and hypocritical because Tom runs around with poor people who drink all day (especially his mistress), while he criticizes his wife for knowing a man that is all too friendly in his taste. His remark about fishes reflects upon the quote, "There are many fishes in the sea," saying that loose women meet odd single men that are single for a good explanation. Tom tries to convince Nick these horrible things about his wife to make himself feel better that she has connections with someone as powerful, handsome, and popular as himself.
"So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end."
We learn that Gatsby's real name is James Gatz. He changed it after the start of his career at age seventeen when he helped a man named Dan Cody with his yacht. Gatsby had a rough life in the beginning. He was a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher, and did anything that got him food and a bed. Cody's luxurious yacht represented all the beauty and glamour of the world to Gatsby. Gatsby let Cody buy him clothes, and eventually the traveled to the West Indies and the Barbary Coast together. The point of this quote is to show that Gatsby was willing to do anything to be in the rich community, instead of the suffering, poor community.
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself”.
Gatsby envisions himself as a young person, living their lifestyle, and walking their walk. Fitzgerald points out that this youthful being is Gatsby’s “Platonic conception of himself,” so he believes that he actually is youthful and plays on this disposition throughout the novel. For example, when he sees Daisy for the first time, close to the beginning of the novel, he turns into this dumbstruck teenager, who is not able to control himself. In reality, we all have this outlook on ourselves, we picture ourselves as smart or athletic or funny, and when we don’t meet up with these expectations, we fall off the pedestal.
"I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby’s bedroom, a gray, florid man with a hard, empty face — the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon."
The portrait is of Dan Cody. Gatsby has it hanging in his room because that is how much he influenced his life. Even though all Carraway sees is a harsh and dreadful looking old man, Gatsby sees someone who helped him through his career and life. Because of Cody, Gatsby never became an alcoholic. When Gatsby saw how alcohol affected his life, he never got into the idea of getting sloppy, and drunk. Gatsby also inherited money from Cody. $25,000 that he never got, yet he did get an education from this experience.
"I wouldn't ask too much of her...you can't repeat the past."
Nick is telling this to Gatsby to inform him that Daisy is not the same person she was when they first met. In the past, nothing could have separated them besides that fact that he had little money. Therefore, after he left for the army she remarried Tom for social status reasons. Now that Gatsby is rich, he is trying to go back to the past and change how Daisy feels about him. Daisy is not happy with being married to Tom, but she will not leave him because she is content with her social status. Gatsby is convinced that he can relive the most exciting era in his life, but Nick assures him that he cannot.
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