As dawn approaches the following day, Nick hears a taxi finally pull up into Gatsby's driveway and he rushes to get dressed and go over. Nothing had happened and Daisy had simply gone to bed. Dejected, Jay had returned home. Now the mansion, previously so full of life and music and people, is empty. Its air is stale as the two search for cigarettes. The piano is called "ghostly" and dust fills the house everywhere reflecting the stagnated state of its owner's mind. Nick urges him to flee from Long Island until the news of the accident had dissipated, yet Gatsby does not budge at all. Daisy's image continues to possess him despite its already evident failure. He laments the past and his first meeting with her. It is at this time that the story of Dan Cody is related as well which Nick had already explained earlier. While an officer stationed in the South at Camp Taylor, Jay had come as a suitor with many other officers to Daisy's house. Whereas women in his past had come to displease him, something about this woman drew his heart close. Her house had "a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms...of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender....It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy - it increased her value in his eyes." Chapter 8, pg. 148. Her being such a challenge to win over made him want her even more since she was neither the inexperienced woman whom he had despised or the experienced one who obsessed over things he took for granted. She seemed to be different from the other women in his past and as such he was drawn to her with a great intensity.
Gatsby recounts going to war and coming back to discover Daisy had married. He revisited old places the two had shared in the limited time they had spent together. While telling his story, Gatsby
"stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast...and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever."Chapter 8, pg. 153.
At last the two men finish their breakfast and Gatsby's gardener announces that he will drain the swimming pool due to the fall leaves, claiming that they clog the pipes if the pool is kept open much longer. Realizing he hadn't used it all summer, Gatsby decides to go for a swim that day by himself, since Nick has to go off to New York City to work. Nick agrees to call at noon to make certain he is all right, thanking him again for being so hospitable and considerate. Gatsby lingers half-heartedly on the thought that Daisy may call him during the day. Even after realizing that he has lost her, a piece still clings and hopes that she could still be won back.
While at work, Carraway receives a telephone call from Jordan Baker, who complains mildly about his abruptness the previous night in refusing to come inside Buchanan's home. At first Nick is polite and listens, which turns into apathy as she struggles for a time to meet him, and eventually the conversation ends with a click of the receiver while Nick does not remember whether it was he or she who had hung up. The disconnection he has felt throughout the novel increases as even Jordan is treated with indifference, a woman he had begun to like and enjoy. After observing this twisted mess between Tom and Myrtle and Daisy and Gatsby and the direction these romances have taken, he has become disgusted with the entire scene. Whatever his reasons, he refocuses on Gatsby and attempts to call the house several times as promised although the line is busy due to a call from Detroit. Giving up, he decides to wait and catch a train back to Long Island in a few hours.
Meanwhile at the garage, a delirious George Wilson had continued to be comforted by the Greek restaurant owner next door, Michaelis. He obsesses over who owned the car that had killed his wife, saying that he had a way of finding out. The Greek continues to try to calm him, asking about his life in order to get his mind off Myrtle, advising that he call a priest for support. However, Wilson persists by opening a drawer to reveal the dog collar that Tom had bought for Myrtle earlier in the summer. George insists that the man who had run her over had bought it for her. He goes on to claim that the man in the yellow car was having an affair with her and when she had run out into the road to see him. He had simply murdered her and continued driving. Michaelis wonders whether she was running to stop a car outside, since she had seen Buchanan driving the station wagon earlier that day, or rather to flee her husband who had locked her up. Wilson behaves oddly, muttering to himself and rocking his body back and forth saying at last that he had told Myrtle how "'"God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!"'" Chapter 8, pg. 160. In saying this he looks out of the window at the advertisement bearing the bespeckled eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleberg glaring out across the ash heap. Wilson continues looking out the window even while the Greek assures him that it is only an advertisement and not the eyes of God. Michaelis leaves for a while and when he returns George's garage is empty. Wilson has taken off running across the roads of Long Island searching for the owner of the big yellow car. At last, Wilson arrives in West Egg and asks the directions to Gatsby's house, having already learned whom he was seeking.
Gatsby had gone off into his pool to swim, while carrying a floating mattress to lay on in the water, among "yellowing trees" after informing his butler to get him if there were any phone calls, still half-heartedly waiting for Daisy. Even as he lay out in the pool at that summer's end and George Wilson crept over to shoot Gatsby to death with a gun and then to shoot himself:
"Gatsby himself didn't believe [her call]would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true 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...." Chapter 8, pg. 162
Thus his dream finally faded and withered like the summer leaves already beginning to fall, like the twilight and the approaching night. With this lost dream, which had driven him to work and function for the past five years, he suddenly lacked focus and motivation. Wilson too, driven mad by the thought of his dead wife and unable to escape his own visions, is very much in the same boat as Gatsby, though it is revenge that drives him. As Daisy had been the source for Gatsby, so is Myrtle the source for George. George shoots Gatsby there in the pool and then shoots himself, the two like-minded men delivered at last from their misery and hopelessness after losing two women who had been so dear in different ways.
Nick arrives home from work at last and, accompanied by the butler, the gardener and the chauffeur, discovers both bodies in the yard. Still held afloat by the inflatable mattress in the pool, Gatsby's body is encompassed by "a cluster of leaves" drifting about in the streams of his blood as Wilson's body lays nearby in the grass.
