Great Gatsby Illusion vs Reality Quotes

The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick is from a prominent and well off family, but hasn’t lived the luxurious life that Daisy and Tom have. Instead Nick’s family achieved the American Dream through hard work. Referring to the family’s tradition of who they were descended from, he admits that’s all an illusion.

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.
‘Look!’ she complained. ‘I hurt it.’
We all looked – the knuckle was black and blue.
‘You did it, Tom,’ she said accusingly. ‘I know you didn’t mean to, but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a – ‘
‘I hate that word hulking,’ objected Tom crossly, ‘even in kidding.’
‘Hulking,’ insisted Daisy.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Daisy’s bruised finger is a symbol of the marriage between her and Tom. Their relationship, like the conversation, is full of tension and immaturity, is not built on concrete foundations and will easily fall apart. The marriage is an illusion and they both go on to have affairs and continue to live together as if they were happily married.

‘Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.’
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.
‘I don’t think it’s so much THAT,’ argued Lucille sceptically; ‘it’s more that he was a German spy during the war.’
One of the men nodded in confirmation.
‘I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,’ he assured us positively.
‘Oh, no,’ said the first girl, ‘it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.’ As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. ‘You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 3. Will the real Jay Gatsby please stand up? Gatsby is a mystery man, the master illusionist, and no one really knows who he is or how he got his money. At his lavish all-night parties his illusion is further fed by rumors and elaborate stories his guests tell about him.

‘See!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too – didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3. Owl-eyed man in Gatsby’s library gives one of first hints that Gatsby is a fraud. He expresses surprise that Gatsby’s books are real, not fake, as he had expected. He had thought the books would be ‘a nice durable cardboard’, giving the illusion of a library where none existed. Gatsby’s life is all for show, he has a library filled with books that have never been read, making him seem more cultured than he really is. While Gatsby can buy the things that rich people have, he can’t buy the education or experience.

‘I’ll tell you God’s truth.’ His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. ‘I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 4. Jay Gatsby raises his right hand and invokes God’s retribution if he is lying. Which is course he is, having invented the illusion of coming from old money and being a highly educated Oxford man.

He hurried the phrase ‘educated at Oxford,’ or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him now. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 4. Nick notices Gatsby seeming to choke on the words ‘educated at Oxford’, making him suspicious of him, as if Gatsby is telling a lie. It turns out Gatsby did attend Oxford, but only for five months before dropping out.

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 5, Nick on Gatsby’s idealization of Daisy, his vision of her seemingly better than the real Daisy. Is Gatsby’s great dream of being with Daisy something real or just an illusion, Nick wonders?
'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!' - Great Gatsby quote In Past

‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’
‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 6, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. Gatsby dreams that he can repeat the past, and make Daisy love him completely once again. But the reality is Daisy is married to Tom and to his money.

‘About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small investigation of his past.’
‘And you found he was an Oxford man,’ said Jordan helpfully.
‘An Oxford man!’ He was incredulous. ‘Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7. Tom Buchanan believes that wealth alone can’t make somebody fit into the upper echelons of society, they need to be educated as well. He laughs at the suggestion Gatsby studied at Oxford, because he doesn’t wear the right clothes.

‘I spoke to her,’ he muttered, after a long silence. ‘I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window’ – with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it – ‘and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’
Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night.
‘God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson.
‘That’s an advertisement,’ Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 8, George Wilson is talking about his dead wife Myrtle, whom he found out had been cheating on him. Wilson believes that God, the source of ultimate knowledge and justice, sees everything. He confuses the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg with the eyes of God, but they are the remains of an old billboard advert for a company that no longer exists.

He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8. Nick imagines what Gatsby must have been feeling when George Wilson shot him as he lay on an air mattress in his pool. He tries to imagine what it was like for Gatsby to have lost his dream – the American Dream and Daisy who was a major part of it. The symbolism of the flower suggests that Gatsby felt disillusioned with Daisy and she was not a worthy object of his worship. The ‘ashen’ figure is George Wilson, the character most closely associated with the Valley of Ashes.
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