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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter 1 - Part 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 haven1’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 judgments2, 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 privy3 to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned5 sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity6 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 plagiaristic7 and marred8 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 snobbishly9 suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance10, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes11, 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 riotous12 excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt13 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 dignified14 under the name of the “creative temperament15.”—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 preyed16 on Gatsby, what foul17 dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive18 sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan19, and we have a tradition that we’re descended20 from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder21 of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale22 hardware business that my father carries on to-day.
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 migration23 known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly24 that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged25 edge of the universe—so I decided26 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—ye—es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently27, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting28 town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow29 at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge30 and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually31 conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking32 and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising33 to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the “Yale News.”—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut34 out into the most domesticated35 body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. they are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls36 that fly overhead. to the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister37 contrast between them. my house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. the one on my right was a colossal38 affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking39 new under a thin beard of raw ivy4, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. it was Gatsby’s mansion40. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity41 of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments42, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence43 at twenty-one that everything afterward44 savors45 of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies46 from Lake Forest. it was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence47 of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum48 of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing49 with his legs apart on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious50 manner. Two shining arrogant51 eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening52 boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
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1
haven
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| n.安全的地方，避难所，庇护所 | |
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judgments
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| 判断( judgment的名词复数 )； 鉴定； 评价； 审判 | |
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privy
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| adj.私用的；隐密的 | |
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ivy
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| n.常青藤，常春藤 | |
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feigned
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| a.假装的，不真诚的 | |
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levity
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| n.轻率，轻浮，不稳定，多变 | |
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plagiaristic
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| adj.剽窃的，抄袭的 | |
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marred
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| adj. 被损毁, 污损的 | |
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snobbishly
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tolerance
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| n.宽容；容忍，忍受；耐药力；公差 | |
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marshes
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| n.沼泽，湿地( marsh的名词复数 ) | |
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riotous
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| adj.骚乱的；狂欢的 | |
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exempt
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| adj.免除的；v.使免除；n.免税者，被免除义务者 | |
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dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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preyed
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| v.掠食( prey的过去式和过去分词 )；掠食；折磨；（人）靠欺诈为生 | |
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foul
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| adj.污秽的；邪恶的；v.弄脏；妨害；犯规；n.犯规 | |
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abortive
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| adj.不成功的，发育不全的 | |
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clan
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| n.氏族，部落，宗族，家族，宗派 | |
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descended
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| a.为...后裔的，出身于...的 | |
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Founder
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| n.创始者，缔造者 | |
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wholesale
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| n.批发；adv.以批发方式；vt.批发，成批出售 | |
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migration
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| n.迁移，移居，（鸟类等的）迁徙 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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commuting
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| 交换（的） | |
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bungalow
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| n.平房，周围有阳台的木造小平房 | |
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dodge
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| v.闪开，躲开，避开；n.妙计，诡计 | |
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casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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banking
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| n.银行业，银行学，金融业 | |
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promising
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| adj.有希望的，有前途的 | |
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jut
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| v.突出；n.突出，突出物 | |
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domesticated
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| adj.喜欢家庭生活的；（指动物）被驯养了的v.驯化( domesticate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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gulls
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| n.鸥( gull的名词复数 )v.欺骗某人( gull的第三人称单数 ) | |
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sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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colossal
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| adj.异常的，庞大的 | |
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spanking
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| adj.强烈的，疾行的；n.打屁股 | |
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mansion
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| n.大厦，大楼；宅第 | |
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proximity
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| n.接近，邻近 | |
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accomplishments
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| n.造诣；完成( accomplishment的名词复数 )；技能；成绩；成就 | |
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excellence
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| n.优秀，杰出，(pl.)优点，美德 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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savors
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| v.意味，带有…的性质( savor的第三人称单数 )；给…加调味品；使有风味；品尝 | |
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ponies
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| 矮种马，小型马( pony的名词复数 )； ￡25 25 英镑 | |
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47
turbulence
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| n.喧嚣，狂暴，骚乱，湍流 | |
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momentum
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| n.动力，冲力，势头；动量 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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50
supercilious
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| adj.目中无人的，高傲的；adv.高傲地；n.高傲 | |
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51
arrogant
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| adj.傲慢的，自大的 | |
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glistening
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| adj.闪耀的，反光的v.湿物闪耀，闪亮( glisten的现在分词 ) | |
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