The Great Gatsby - Chapter 6 Summary and Analysis

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Here is a summary and analysis of The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6.

Along with Chapter 5, chapter 6 helps to spell out to Nick, and to us, the exact extent to which Gatsby’s ability to dream reaches. Remember that way back in chapter 1 Nick first introduces us to Gatsby by telling us that he possessed “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person.” It’s in this chapter that the meaning of this statement comes to light. Come on, I’ll show you what I mean.

It’s interesting, first, to point out Nick as a very conscious narrator - he tells us at multiple points in the story - including here at the beginning of chapter 6 - that he’s making a conscious decision as a narrator regarding which details to share with us and when. The details he chooses to disclose at the opening of Chapter 6 involve Gatsby’s backstory - his real backstory, confirming for us what we suspected all along: Gatsby is a persona, or an act. Gatsby’s real name, in fact, is James Gatz, but he adopts the more sophisticated “Jay Gatsby” when he encounters the wealthy Dan Cody’s yacht on Lake Superior. This represents a literal reinvention of himself, where Gatsby only had to speak and act the part to become the man.

Gatsby’s parents are described as “shiftless” farmers from North Dakota, which sounds incredibly boring if you ask me. You can imagine, like Nick actually does, a young James Gatz restlessly stirring in this environment. It’s at the beginning of chapter 6 that we get some of the most detailed and poetic interpretations of Gastby from Nick. Gatsby, we are told, which is to say that Gatsby literally invented an idealized version of himself, cultivated within his wild and restless imagination.

Nick summarizes young Gatsby in this way: “His heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”

Basically, Nick is saying that no one has the ability to imagine and dream with as much depth and passion as Gatsby - he dreams so big for himself that he no longer accepts reality itself and instead recognizes that his life can be as big as he makes it.

James Gatsby first applies his imaginative self-conception and becomes Gatsby when he encounters Dan Cody’s yacht, which Nick suggests must have “represented all the beauty and glamor in the world.” It’s interesting the connection between Gatsby and the allure of wealth that many descriptions point out. At any rate, five years with the wealthy, self-made Dan Cody help Gatsby refine the persona he’s trying to project. He didn’t end up with any money from Cody, but Gatsby did come away with a solidified version of who he was and a pathway toward his inevitable success.

So ends Nick’s delve into Gatsby’s background for now. Nick admits he had reached a point with Gatsby where he “had reached the point of believing everything and nothing about him.” We as readers were at about the same point - so Nick obliges our curiosity with some smatterings of the truth. Though there are more questions that remain unanswered, and more truths regarding his service “to a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.”

The actual events of the chapter actually begin when Nick says he stops by Gatsby’s one afternoon when Tom and two friends suddenly arrive on horseback. This little scene is rather odd in that Tom and two unknown friends just suddenly show up at Gatsby’s - on horses - okay. This reminds us of the fact that people just show up at Gatsby’s - first the partygoers, but now Tom himself (something that he’ll critique others for later on). Gatsby and Tom met very briefly in Chapter 4, which Gatsby acknowledges, but then Gatsby sort of awkwardly lets it slip that he knows Daisy, which bristles Tom’s possessive nature, and he confides in Nick “I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.” Now, the obvious hypocrisy of Tom’s concern about Daisy running around aside, Tom is none too impressed with Gatsby, and we have to remember that the “new money” Gatsby represents in West Egg is always suspect in the “old money” minds of people like Tom...