Even though Daisy loved Gatsby still, she decided to marry Tom due to his wealth and name. Essays Essays FlashCards. Browse Essays. Sign in. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Show More. Read More. Words: - Pages: 9. Great Gatsby Morality The spiritual emptiness of Americans was the truly incurable aspect.
Words: - Pages: 7. Words: - Pages: 4. Daisy's Role In The Great Gatsby This strong desire ultimately led to her death as she was literally and metaphorically chasing after Tom and was hit by his car. Words: - Pages: 5. Words: - Pages: 6. However, you could also argue that, as someone with knowledge of Gatsby and Daisy's original relationship, Jordan knows how devastated Daisy was when she got a letter from Gatsby, feels compelled to help the pair reunite.
Finally, Jordan might also see it as an opportunity to expose Daisy as much less virtuous as she comes off. Jordan is consistently the only character who recognizes Daisy as less-than-perfect, as evidenced in her remarks about Daisy in Chapter 4 "Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know.
They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely spotless reputation. Perhaps because she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.
Nudging Daisy into an affair with Gatsby could be Jordan's way of working to expose Daisy to the scrutiny that everyone else in their circles seems to face for similar behavior. Jordan, similar to Nick, is adjacent to much of the main action and not directly involved, so many students wonder what exactly she's doing in the book. Especially since Nick does have a crucial role as narrator, Jordan can seem a bit superfluous at times.
So why include her? Well, for one thing, she does have an important role to play in the story. Purely from a plot perspective, she helps connect Nick to Gatsby in Chapter 3, and she also helps connect Gatsby and Daisy. She helps sets the wheels of the affair in motion, and, of course, the affair drives the main action of the novel.
Without Jordan, Gatsby would have relied entirely on Nick to reach Daisy, which would have taken some of the suspense out of Gatsby's motivations even though Jordan learns Gatsby's secret in Chapter 3, we don't learn it until Chapter 4. But Jordan is also important in how she allows us to understand other characters. She helps us understand Daisy by being such a contrast to her, and of course offers some crucial insights about Daisy herself during her brief stint as the narrator in Chapter 4.
Furthermore, Jordan also gives us some insights about Nick since we can see his reactions to her and their relationship. In fact, Jordan's relationship with Nick is one of our main inroads into understanding Nick's personal life and feelings. So while Jordan is not directly involved in the main drama, she is a crucial lynchpin both for the plot and our understanding of the other major characters.
Nick attends Gatsby's funeral along with Gatsby's father and Owl Eyes. Tom and Daisy have skipped town due to Daisy's role in Myrtle's death, Meyer Wolfshiem also wants to keep his distance since he is painted as cautious and disloyal, and Myrtle and George are dead. So out of the book's major characters, Jordan is the only one unaccounted for at Gatsby's funeral. Some readers wonder why she doesn't show up, given her relationship with Nick and the fact that she at least knew Gatsby, and even helped him reunite with Daisy.
First of all, Nick doesn't try to invite Jordan to the funeral that we know of , especially since it seems their conversation late in Chapter 9 is the first they have spoken since Nick "threw her over" on the telephone the morning after Myrtle's death. Perhaps Jordan hears about Gatsby's death but avoids his funeral because she assumes Nick will be there. If Nick invited her would she have considered attending?
Likely not. Jordan, like the other characters, is very conscious about appearances and, furthermore, she is a character who likes being involved in gossip and intrigue but manages to mostly remain out of serious trouble or scandal herself. So even were she invited, going to Gatsby's funeral might be seen as more risky than it's worth, especially since she wasn't that close to Gatsby.
One of the single most important parts of your college application is what classes you choose take in high school in conjunction with how well you do in those classes. Our team of PrepScholar admissions experts have compiled their knowledge into this single guide to planning out your high school course schedule. So what does Nick and Jordan's relationship add to the story? Why include it at all? Read more about love, desire, and relationships in Gatsby to find out. Jordan is a key figure in the first half of the novel as Gatsby moves to reunite with Daisy.
Read summaries of Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 to get some in-depth takes of her most important scenes. We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:. Halle Edwards graduated from Stanford University with honors.
She also took nine AP classes, earning a perfect score of 5 on seven AP tests. As a graduate of a large public high school who tackled the college admission process largely on her own, she is passionate about helping high school students from different backgrounds get the knowledge they need to be successful in the college admissions process. Our new student and parent forum, at ExpertHub. See how other students and parents are navigating high school, college, and the college admissions process.
Ask questions; get answers. How to Get a Perfect , by a Perfect Scorer. Score on SAT Math. Score on SAT Reading. Score on SAT Writing. What ACT target score should you be aiming for? Quotes Jordan Baker. Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest.
There was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride. Popular pages: The Great Gatsby. She treats her daughter as a beautiful object, bringing her out only for show and then apparently forgetting her. Her language in addressing the child is telling. She does not call her by name only the governess does.
You absolute little dream. His abundance of expensive shirts, a sign of the beauty that material success can bring, moves Daisy to a moment of what appears to be genuine emotion. But in the end Daisy turns to Tom again because, like Nick, she expects that men will have integrity, at least outside the sexual realm.
It should be noted that Gatsby similarly denies Daisy her full humanity. His insistence that she declare that she had never loved Tom, born out of his need to restore Daisy to her younger self, points to his inability to perceive Daisy as a person who has grown and changed.
By so simplifying the moral complexities of this situation, Nick avoids having to take responsibility for his own actions.
By deciding that Daisy is a child and that the truth is an unutterable fact, he does not need to worry about the morality of his failure to tell the police or to testify at the inquest that Daisy had been driving.
Nick seeks a similar simplicity when it comes to his understanding of Gatsby and to his own choice of retreating from the world that Gatsby represents. This evasion also allows Nick to avoid acting on what he knows while he presents himself as making mature, responsible, moral choices.
To support his displacement of responsibility from the dreamer to the dream, in this case from Gatsby to the American dream, Nick repeatedly points to ways in which Gatsby was molded by American culture.
But Nick is riot content with this reading of Gatsby. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor. Nick evidences the same sort of contradictions when it comes to his own choices. On the one hand, he is deeply aware of the ways in which the modern world lacks order, purpose, and morality. It is he who identifies the valley of ashes as a wasteland and who so lyrically explains at the end of the novel that the vision of America as a New Eden was always and only an illusion.
In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the side-walk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress.
Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels.
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