The Great Gatsby

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The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!’
—THOMAS PARKE D’INVILLIERS

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Chapter 1
I
n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave
me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind
ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me,
‘ just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had
the advantages that you’ve had.’
He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually
communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he
meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m in-
clined 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 it appears in a
normal person, and so it came about that in college I was
unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy
to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the con-
fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep,
preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some
unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver-
ing 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 my fa-

The Great Gatsby

ther snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense
of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at
birth.
And, a?fer boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to
the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded
on the hard rock or the wet marshes but a?fer a certain point
I don’t care what it’s 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 forever; I want-
ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses
into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his
name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby
who represented everything for which I have an unaffect-
ed scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of 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 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 gi?f for hope, a romantic readiness
such as I have never found in any 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 been prominent, well-to-do people in
this middle-western city