Homework #8 (Chapter 8)

Add another episode to Gatsby's memoir recalling how he fell in love with Daisy and how important she was to him and what she represented. This memoir was prompted by the melancholy and uncertainty he felt after his confrontal with Tom on a hot summer day in New York.

Five years ago, I had been overwhelmed by Daisy since I first met her. She was the first nice girl I had ever known. I went to her house, at first with other officers form Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed me-I had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there. It was as casual a thing to her as my tent out at camp was to me. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool that other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. I t excited me too that many men had already loved Daisy-it increased her value in my eyes. I felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

However, I felt that Daisy was out of reach for me because I was penniless. I would settle for taking whatever I could get for a while until I succeeded in being intimate with her. Instead of this making me happy, it only made me angry with myself for misleading her about my social status. Rather than despise myself, I became infatuated with Daisy. I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her. On the last afternoon before I went abroad I sat with Daisy in my arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and I changed my arm a little and once I kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made us tranquil for a while as if to give us a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised. We had never been closer in our month of love nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against my coat’s shoulder or when I touched the end of my finger, gently, as though she were asleep.

I did extraordinarily well in the war earning officer promotions and command of the machine gun division. After the Armistice I had tried frantically to return home to Daisy, but a misunderstanding in the military sent me to Oxford rather than back to America. I was still receiving letters from Daisy, but her letters had taken on a new tone of concern about my inability to get home and reassure her of her actions. She desperately needed guidance in her life by a strong male figure. Tom Buchanan, who flattered her, filled this void of influence. I learned of the crushing news in a letter while I was still at Oxford.

I returned from France while