Gatsby First Chapter

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave

me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind

ever since.

‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me,

‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had

the advantages that you’ve had.’

He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually

communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he

meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined

to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up

many curious natures to me and also made me the victim

of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to

detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a

normal person, and so it came about that in college I was

unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy

to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences

were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep,

preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some

unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering

on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young

men or at least the terms in which they express them are

usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still

a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense

of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at

birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to

the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded

on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point

I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from

the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in

uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted

no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses

into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his

name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby

who represented everything for which I have an unaffected

scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful

gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him,

some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he

were related to one of those intricate machines that register

earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness

had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which

is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’—

it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness

such as I have never found in any other person and which

it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned

out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what

foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily

closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded

elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in

this middle-western city for three generations. The CarFree

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raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that

we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual

founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who

came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and

started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries

on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look

like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled

painting that hangs in Father’s office. I graduated from New

Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father,

and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration

known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid

so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the

warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like

the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and

learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond

business so I supposed it could support one more single

man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were

choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—yees’

with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance

me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently,

I

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