The Great Gatsby

n Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby's house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn. 'He's a bootlegger,' said the young ladies, and somewhere among the wine and the flowers and the music, they moved with a certain haste and a certain carelessness, as if they were already aware that the party was over. Gatsby's notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the 'underground pipe-line to Canada' attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota—that was something he took for granted. On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy on a white wicker settee in the rose garden of her parents' house. It was a cool day with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The gardener was cutting the grass in the garden, and Gatsby saw that the gardener's shears were clipping along the line of a last year's path. Gatsby took out his watch. 'It's just two minutes to four,' he said. He looked at Daisy, and then at the watch again. 'In just two minutes it'll be five years since I last saw you.'

Gatsby takes Nick to lunch in New York, revealing more about his past. He shows Nick a medal from the war and a photograph of himself at Oxford, trying to prove his legitimacy. He also introduces Nick to Meyer Wolfsheim, a shady business associate who reveals that Gatsby made his money through bootlegging. The chapter reveals Gatsby's dual identity—the man he was (James Gatz from North Dakota) and the man he became (Jay Gatsby). Rumors about Gatsby circulate—that he's a bootlegger, that he killed a man, that he's a German spy. The chapter also includes a flashback to Gatsby's first meeting with Daisy five years earlier, showing the moment that would define his entire life. The scene in the rose garden, with Gatsby watching the clock, shows his obsession with recapturing the past—a past that can never be recaptured. This chapter establishes Gatsby's central conflict: his attempt to reinvent himself and recapture a lost love, a dream that can never be realized.