In Chapter one, Nick describes Gatsby as someone "with a heightened sensitivity to to the promises of life," possessed of "an extraordinary gift for hope" or a "romantic readiness." In other words, Gatsby is determined to make himself, and his life, into what he wants it to be. His persona as the mysterious man without a past is built on in chapter two, when Myrtle's sister Catherine speculates that Gatsby "is a nephew or cousin...
In Chapter one, Nick describes Gatsby as someone "with a heightened sensitivity to to the promises of life," possessed of "an extraordinary gift for hope" or a "romantic readiness." In other words, Gatsby is determined to make himself, and his life, into what he wants it to be. His persona as the mysterious man without a past is built on in chapter two, when Myrtle's sister Catherine speculates that Gatsby "is a nephew or cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's." This thread is picked up again in Chapter three, when guests at Gatsby's party speculate that he "killed a man" or had been "a German spy."
In fact, Gatsby is best characterized by his possessions; much of Chapter three is given to describing the scene at one of his famous parties, going into detail about the crates of oranges and lemons delivered to his house, the food, the size of the orchestra, the colored lights in his garden, his books.
When Nick first meets Gatsby, he doesn't recognize him at first; they chat about the war, and when Gatsby finally tells him who he is, Gatsby
"smiled understandingly ... It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it....It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
The smile is another expression of Gatsby's "gift for hope," an expression of confidence in the goodness of the word, a goodness that includes Nick. It is only after the smile fades that Nick realizes that he "was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd."
In this way, in the first three chapters, Gatsby is characterized as both a young man whose pretensions to gentility are almost "absurd," and a person whose essential optimism and romanticism about life find expression in big parties thrown for hundreds of people he doesn't know.
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