Gatsby and Daisy--the initial relationship that he explains retrospectively to Nick--and its implications for the rest of the novel (what a lot of retrospective narrative there is in the text, to be sure!) It's worth considering its impact on a contemporary audience.
It's probably hard for you to feel the force of the confession that he makes, but try to imagine that you are back in the aftermath of the First World War, at a time when young girls were very much protected, and there was a huge premium placed on chastity before marriage. There's Daisy, daghter of a rich family, queen of the neighbourhood, and there's Jay Gatz, with his foreign name and his lack of cash, his only attractions his good looks and his anonymising uniform that gives him a spurious respectability...
Consider the kind of threat that marriage or relationships 'outside' the clan mean for the respectable girls and their families. In one sense, isn't Gatz a kind of predator, sniffing around the whole world that Daisy represents, and not just the girl herself? How far can his attraction to her be separated from his attraction to the American Dream?
Think about that and then look at these quotations again:
• It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes.
• He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously— eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.
• He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.
• He felt married to her, that was all.
I find more and more that the idea of 'corruption' here is profoundly political and class-based. What do you think?
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