As Chapter 5 begins Nick comes home from the city after a date with Jordan. He is surprised to see Gatsby’s mansion lit up brightly; it seems to be unoccupied, as the house is totally silent. Gatsby startles Nick as he walks home by approaching him from across the lawn. Gatsby seems agitated and almost desperate to make Nick happy—he invites him to Coney Island, then for a swim in his pool. Nick realizes that Gatsby is nervous because he wants Nick to agree to his plan of inviting Daisy to tea. Nick tells Gatsby that he will help him with the plan. Overjoyed, Gatsby immediately offers to have someone cut Nick’s grass. He also offers him the chance to make some money by joining him in some business he does on the side—business that does not involve Meyer Wolfshiem. Nick is slightly offended that Gatsby wants to pay him for arranging the meeting with Daisy and refuses Gatsby’s offers, but he still agrees to call Daisy and invite her to his house.
This is the pivotal chapter of The Great Gatsby, as Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy is the hinge on which the novel revolves. Before their meeting, the story of their relationship exists only in Gatsby’s dreams.
As the novel explores ideas of love, excess, and the American dream, it becomes clearer and clearer to the reader that Gatsby’s emotional frame of mind is out of sync with the passage of time. His nervousness about the present and about how Daisy’s attitude toward him may have changed causes him to knock over Nick’s clock, symbolizing the clumsiness of his attempt to stop time and retrieve the past. This passage causes mixed emotions: pity and almost humor.
In this chapter, Gatsby’s house is compared several times to that of a feudal lord, and his imported clothes, antiques, and luxuries all display nostalgia for the lifestyle of a British aristocrat. Though Nick and Daisy are amazed and dazzled by Gatsby’s splendid possessions, a number of things in Nick’s narrative suggest that something is not right about this transplantation of an aristocrat’s lifestyle into democratic America. For example, Nick notes that the brewer who built the house in which Gatsby now lives tried to pay the neighboring villagers to have their roofs thatched, to complement the style of the mansion. They refused, Nick says, because “Americans are obstinately unwilling to play the role of peasants”. Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers envisioned America as a place that would be free of the injustices of class and caste, a place where people from humble backgrounds would be free to try to improve ones self economically and socially. Chapter V suggests that this dream of improvement, carried to its logical conclusion, results in a superficial imitation of the old European social system that America left behind.
As the reader continues with the novel one begins to think things in society have not evolved. We still deal with excess, only now we have the 24/7 news cycle constantly dinning in our ears.
