The Great Gatsby- 8

Chapter 5 is an important chapter of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, as Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy is what makes this novel rock from happy to sad. Before this event, the story of their relationship exists only in talk and memories. The plot shifts its focus to the romance between Gatsby and Daisy, and the tensions in their relationship becomes real. After Gatsby’s history with Daisy is revealed, a meeting between the two becomes inevitable, and it is highly appropriate that the theme of the past’s significance to the future is evoked in this chapter.This part of the novel explores ideas of love, excess, and the American dream, it becomes clearer and clearer to the reader that Gatsby’s emotional frame is out of sync with the passage of time. His nervousness about the present and about how Daisy’s attitude toward him may have changed causes him to knock over Nick’s clock, symbolizing the clumsiness of his attempt to stop time and retrieve the past. Gatsby was so terribly emberrased and came to believe that all he had done was a mistake. "'This is a terrible mistake,' he said, shaking his head from side to side, 'a terrible, terrible mistake'" [Fitzgerald,87].