1 The Great Gatsby: Introduction + Chapter I

Chapter I

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been thinking about ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” 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 much more than that.

As a result, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious personalities to me and also made me the victim of quite 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 unsolicited—frequently I have pretended to be asleep, preoccupied, or openly indifferent when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was imminent; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually unoriginal and marred by obvious omissions.

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 parceled out unequally at birth.

And after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Behavior may be founded on solid ground or shaky foundations, 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 wild adventures 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 a genuine 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 weak 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 was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams, that temporarily closed out my interest in the frustrated sorrows and short-lived joys of men.