Topic Tracking: Relationships
Relationships 1: Despite Tom and Daisy Buchanan's appearance of happiness, it seems that there is discontentment underlying their marriage. She expresses sadness and regret due to Tom's unfaithfulness to her and wishes that her baby girl be a fool to be oblivious of the cruel things in the world.
Relationships 2: Nick himself is said to be pursuing a love interest back home, which he seems reluctant to discuss. Tom Buchanan cautions Nick about not believing Daisy's words to him about her unhappiness in marriage.
Relationships 3: George and Myrtle Wilson are another married couple that seems to be unhappy. Myrtle orders her husband around and he obeys, not realizing she is having an affair with one of his customers, Tom Buchanan. Myrtle is upset that her husband is not a rich man and Tom's wealth seems to draw her to him. Both of these two women, Myrtle and Daisy, are upset with their husbands for different reasons.
Relationships 4: Mrs. McKee attempts to talk to her husband and offer advice to him, praising his artistic skill. However Mr. McKee ignores her, becoming too caught up in thoughts of capturing on film this other woman, Myrtle, posing in front of his camera.
Relationships 5: Despite his earlier lack of acknowledging her, Mrs. McKee insists to everyone in the room that she is quite content with her marriage. Myrtle laments about how George had pretended to be a man who would care for her financial needs, and yet when she discovered he had borrowed the very suit he had gotten married in, she was heartbroken. Tom offers her financial security and so she pursues him.
Relationships 6: In their drunken state, the women at Gatsby's party begin to weep and fight with their "men said to be husbands." Even the soloist singer, supposedly the center of entertainment at the party, is reduced to tears over her own unhappiness. The women all appear here to be quite unhappy and the alcohol brings out the truth in this. Gatsby stands alone, watching the entire scene.
Relationships 7: While she had earlier agreed to marry Tom, on her wedding night in a drunken state she suddenly rebels after receiving a letter from Jay Gatsby. However her friends console her and she proceeds with the wedding as if she had never doubted it in the first place.
Relationships 8: Nick had delayed pursuing Baker since he lingered so much on thoughts of another woman back home. However, unlike Daisy on her wedding night to Tom or Gatsby in his persistence in pursuing this woman of his past, Carraway releases this woman from his thoughts. He is able to progress and move forward towards new women to love such as Jordan Baker.
Relationships 9: Daisy's behavior on her wedding night shows how strong her attachment to Gatsby was and is when they are reunited after five years. Gatsby has never pretended to move on to other women but rather has remained faithful all the time they were apart. Yet, as with Myrtle Wilson, Daisy is a lover of luxury; Jay had not had these riches before or a distinguished family background and as such, she was drawn close to Tom Buchanan who offered these things. In viewing his sudden wealth and material possessions however, she is overpowered and breaks down into tears much as Myrtle had cried about her husband's borrowed wedding suit.
Relationships 10: Gatsby's love relationships before Daisy had been unhappy because he found the women to be inexperienced and therefore not at his level or else they were foolish women who obsessed over silly things. Daisy however seemed to break free of these earlier models and set herself apart. For this reason he has pursued her for five years, due to this uniqueness that only she seemed to possess.
Relationships 11: Tom Buchanan has a mistress himself without any guilt at all, but he becomes jealous at the thought of another man even befriending his wife and is immediately suspicious that she may be having an affair.
Relationships 12: There seems to be a breach of communication in Gatsby's relationship to Daisy. He complains continuously that she does not understand him while at the same time he does not try to relate to her either. He assumes that she is the one who is having a problem without thinking about his own behavior or how she perceives him.
Relationships 13: Daisy suspects her husband to be on the telephone talking to his mistress and retaliates by kissing Gatsby while her husband is in the very next room. She offhandedly tells Jordan to kiss Nick if she is feeling left out, as if the whole thing was a fun little game.
Relationships 14: In trying to sort out her emotions, Daisy is unable to say that she does not love Tom. She insists that she loved both he and Gatsby at different times and appears confused and uncertain. Jay is appalled at hearing this and refuses to believe that she had ever loved Tom; yet he does not understand Daisy or her viewpoint due to the distance time has created between them.
Relationships 15: Jordan Baker becomes a figure of peace and security for Nick Carraway in the midst of his depression about being thirty years old. She is said to be set apart from Daisy's clinging to things in the past and to be more intelligent than the other women in their set.
Relationships 16: Daisy and Tom both seem to be relatively unaffected by the gruesome events which have occurred. He has lost his mistress, Myrtle, and it was his wife Daisy who killed her. Yet both are calm and collected and have the stomach to actually eat. Daisy's goal seems to have been getting revenge on Tom for having a mistress and so she had followed Gatsby devotedly. Now the mistress is dead and her husband refocuses onto her.
Relationships 17: Suddenly Nick feels separated from Jordan even after she had been one of the few to offer him solace and comfort. On the telephone her voice drones on while he hardly listens and the conversation has so little meaning to him that he forgets who actually hung up the phone first. Given the twisted mess that he has witnessed between Gatsby, Myrtle, Tom, and Daisy, it would seem that he has become disgusted with all of these love affairs and suddenly Jordan is placed in this category as well.
Relationships 18: Jay Gatsby still held onto to his thoughts of Daisy at his death, waiting for that telephone call although he probably knew it would never come. Daisy had won Tom back from his mistress and as such, Gatsby was no longer necessary to make her husband jealous. George becomes engulfed with revenge for the murder of his wife and seeks to kill the person driving that car. Without Myrtle, he has become a madman and appears to have little else to live for except to exact his justice upon whoever had killed her. This act done, he kills himself.
Relationships 19: Carraway says good-bye to Jordan for the final time even as she proceeds to try to make him jealous just as Daisy had done with Tom by chasing after another man. Baker claims that she is engaged to be married in order to upset Nick. However, he is hardly bothered at all due to the disgust he feels after observing the disaster that this mess of love relationships has caused. He is returning home and leaves her behind.
