most

5,9,9,22 emdashes

3 syntax – interrupting clause

1-2 sense of responsibility? or a kind of bragging?

Thesis:

Jordan's 1^st person narration provides backstory showing Daisy's character as a fickle woman whose affections are easily swayed. Contrasts in register emphasize the discrepancy between the illusion of happiness which is an ongoing theme in the work as a whole.

most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t come that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime,[B1] and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t lay eyes on him again for over four years—even after I’d met him on Long Island I didn’t realize it was the same man.[B2]

13 alliteration, parallel structure – D never "quits"

11-12 Daisy character devel, and D&G relationship – though quickly we find out the whole affair was only a month

That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very often. She went with a slightly older crowd—when she went with anyone at all. Wild rumors were circulating about her—how her mother had found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say good-by to a soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any more, but only with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town, who couldn’t get into the army at all.

18 railroad cars

15-17 dare we say fickle?

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.[B3]

22-23 bathos between similes

I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress—and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.[B4]

“‘Gratulate me,” she muttered. “Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it.”

“What’s the matter, Daisy?”

from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy told him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died.” After a moment she added as if she might have sounded irreverent, ['B5] “There wasn’t any connection.”

Thesis:

This dialogue among the main characters takes place at the beginning of the climactic scene at Plaza Hotel, and introduces a lull in that conflict. Ironically, as they make small talk about Daisy and Tom's wedding, a present wedding is taking place below them; the unhappy mood in their room contrasts powerfully with the mood of hope from the wedding below, echoing the book's vain "promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing."

“I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis,” I remarked.

“That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he left. He gave me an aluminum putter that I use to-day.”

10: Daisy—the dream is over—here they are at the Plaza, drinking and making small talk...no more dancing.

imagery

The music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer floated in at the window, followed by intermittent cries of “Yea-ea-ea!” and finally by a burst of jazz as the dancing began.

“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were young we’d rise and dance.”

syntax: very short sentences, both dialogue and narration—except for the wedding celebration – foil to the rest which is also about a wedding

2,4,10,11,12,14,17 simple, declarative verbs

“Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her. “Where’d you know him, Tom?”

“Biloxi?” He concentrated with an effort. “I didn’t know him. He was a friend of Daisy’s.”

“He was not,” she denied. “I’d never seen him before. He came down in the private car.”

mood – halting conversation? discontent, mild discord, aimlessness—shifts of topic, no commitment to any particular thread

“Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville. Asa Bird brought him around at the last minute and asked if we had room for him.”

Jordan smiled.

“He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of your class at Yale.”

Tom and I looked at each other blankly