1、THE GREAT GATSBY Chapter 1 No-Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby ,what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of man In younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me
2、some advice that Ive been turning over in my mind ever since . Whenever you feel like criticising anyone ,he told me ,just remember that all the people in this world havent had the advantages that youve had. He didnt say any more , but weve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way , and
3、 I understood that he meant a great deal more than that . In consequence ,Im inclined to reserve all judgments , a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when i
4、t appears in a normal person , and so it came about that in college I was privy to the secret griefs of wild ,unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently feigned sleep , preoccupation , or a hostile levity when I realised by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was qu
5、ivering on the horizon ; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them , are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions , Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that , as
6、 my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat , a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth. And ,after boasting this way of my I come to the admission that it has a limit , Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I
7、 dont care what its founded on .When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention for ever ; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this bo
8、ok, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby , who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn .If personality is an unbroken series successful gestures ,then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life ,as if he were related to one of those
9、intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away ,This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the creative temperament -it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any
10、other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again ,No-Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby ,what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men , My family have
11、been prominent ,well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that were descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch ,but the actual founder of my line was my grandfathers brother ,who came here in fifty-one ,sent a subst
12、itute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today .I never saw this great-uncle ,but Im supposed to look like him-with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in fathers office . I graduated from New Haven in 1915 , just a qua
13、rter of a century after my father ,and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration know as the Great War ,I enjoyed the counter raid so thoroughly that I came back restless ,Instead of being the warm centre of the world ,the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the uni
14、verse-so I decided to go East and learn the bond business .Everybody I knew was in the bond business ,so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me ,and finally said ,Why-ye-es, with very grave, hesitant faces
15、. Father agreed to finance me for a year , and after various delays I came East ,permanently , I thought ,in the spring of twenty-two .The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season ,and I had just left a country left a county of wide lawns and friendly tress ,so when a
16、young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town ,it sounded like a great idea. He found the house ,a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington ,and I went out to the country alone . I had a dog-a
17、t least I had him for a few days until he ran away-and Old Dodge and a Finnish woman ,who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I , stopped me on the road .
18、 “How do you get to West Egg village ?” he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide , a pathfinder ,an original settler. He had casually neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fa
19、st movies , I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they sto
20、od on my shelf in red and gold likenew money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college-one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious edi
21、torials for the Yale News-and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man. This isnt just an epigram-lift is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all . It was a matter of chance that I
22、should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York-and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, i
23、dentical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals-like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end-but the
24、ir physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.I lived at West Egg, the-well ,the less fashionable of the two, thought this is a most superfici
25、al tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rentedfor twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard-
26、it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side ,spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy,and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsbys mansion. Or, rather , as I didnt know Mr Gatsby, it was a mansion, inhabited by
27、 a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked ,so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbours lawn, and the consoling proximit y of millionaires-all for eighty dollars a month.Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of
28、 fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed ,and Id known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago. He
29、r husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven-a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything a afterwards savours of anticlimax. His family were e
30、normously wealthy-even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach-but now hed left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away; for instance, hed brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realise that a man in my own generation wa
31、s wealthy enough to do that. Why they came East I dont know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didnt believe it-I ha
32、d no sight into Daisys I heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on for ever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence ofsome irrecoverable football game.And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their h
33、ouse was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of amile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens-finally when it reached the house drif
34、ting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. He had changed
35、 since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his ri
36、ding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body-he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage-a cruel body.His speaking voice
37、, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked-and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. Now, dont think my opinion on these matters is final, he seemed to say, just because Im stron
38、ger and more of a man than you are. We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own. We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch. Ive got a nice place
39、here, he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half-acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snubnosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore. It belonged to Demaine, the
40、 oil man. He turned me around again, politely and abruptly . Well go inside. We walked through a high hallway into a bright rose-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to gro
41、w a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only complet
42、ely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood
43、for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.The yo
44、unger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it-indeed, I
45、 was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise-she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression-then she laughed, an absurd charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room. “Im p
46、-paralysed with happiness.” She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl wa
47、s Baker. (Ive heard it said that Daisys murmur was only to make people lean towards her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.) At any rate, Miss Bakers lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again-the object she was balancing of
48、 a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from meI looked back at my cousin, who began to ask questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is a
49、n arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget; a singing compulsion, a whispered Listen, a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love throug
