Great Gatsby Violence Quotes

Two shining arrogant 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 glistening 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.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick on Tom Buchanan’s appearance. He is described as masculine, aggressive, and also dangerous. A man who could be violent, and in fact is.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, description of Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker. The two are so lightweight that they appear to be floating, the imagery suggests that the characters live restless, dissatisfied and hollow lives. They dress in white, symbol of purity, but that may be seen as ironic because of their own corruption. The tranquility of the scene is disrupted by Tom Buchanan who abruptly shuts the windows with a ‘boom’, suggesting trouble in paradise and Tom’s violent nature.

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.
‘Look!’ she complained. ‘I hurt it.’
We all looked – the knuckle was black and blue.
‘You did it, Tom,’ she said accusingly. ‘I know you didn’t mean to, but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a – ‘
‘I hate that word hulking,’ objected Tom crossly, ‘even in kidding.’
‘Hulking,’ insisted Daisy.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Daisy’s bruised finger is a symbol of the marriage between her and Tom. Their relationship, like the conversation, is full of tension and immaturity, is not built on concrete foundations and will easily fall apart. The marriage is an illusion and they both go on to have affairs and continue to live together as if they were happily married.

‘Civilization’s going to pieces. I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things…The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved…It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Tom Buchanan, whose racism is evident from the very beginning of the novel. He believes that African-American people should not be associated with people of European origin. Even at a dinner party he can barely conceal his violent tendencies.

‘Did you give Nick a little heart-to-heart talk on the veranda?’ demanded Tom suddenly.
‘Did I?’ She looked at me. ‘I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know – ‘
‘Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,’ he advised me.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1. Tom Buchanan, his wife Daisy and Nick. This exchange depicts the unhappy and tense marriage that Daisy has with Tom, who seems worried that she has been airing their dirty laundry. Tom is verbally and emotionally abusive to Daisy.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2. While riding on the train to the city with Tom, Nick tells us that Tom uses the train stop to meet up with his mistress Myrtle Wilson for a night filled with drunkenness and violence. The ‘ashes’ description symbolizes the valley’s moral depravity and social decline.

Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.
‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!’ shouted Mrs. Wilson. ‘I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai – ‘
Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 2, tempers flare at Gatsby’s party, fueled by the bootleg booze. Tom, a vicious brute, breaks the nose of the cheap and vulgar Myrtle.

‘Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.’
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.
‘I don’t think it’s so much THAT,’ argued Lucille sceptically; ‘it’s more that he was a German spy during the war.’
One of the men nodded in confirmation.
‘I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,’ he assured us positively.
‘Oh, no,’ said the first girl, ‘it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.’ As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. ‘You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 3. Will the real Jay Gatsby please stand up? Gatsby is a mystery man, the master illusionist, and no one really knows who he is or how he got his money. At his lavish all-night parties his illusion is further fed by rumors and elaborate stories his guests tell about him.

‘The old Metropole,’ brooded Mr. Wolfsheim gloomily. ‘Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there….they shot him three times in the belly and drove away..

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 4. Racketeer and Gatsby’s friend Meyer Wolfshiem describes to Nick the memory the Metropole holds. He treasures that horrible memory because it was the last one he had of his dear friend, who was murdered there.

I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily, and say: ‘Where’s Tom gone?’ and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together – it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night, and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, because her arm was broken – she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 4, Jordan Baker on the story of the aftermath of Daisy’s marriage. Post-honeymoon Daisy seems to be genuinely head-over-heels for Tom Buchanan. But the first half of this passage also hints that Daisy knows about Tom’s pattern of infidelity, which is confirmed in the second half. The chambermaid he seems to have had a fling with, like most of Tom’s women, also gets injured and suffers a broken arm.

Michaelis and this man reached her first, but when they had torn open her shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored for so long.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 7, the description of Myrtle Wilson’s physical state after she is knocked down by a car and killed is eerie and ghastly.

There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other with little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.

It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 8, Nick’s description of the scene of the murder, when Gatsby’s body is discovered. The language suggests that for all of his wealth and infamy, he he never quite made the impact that he had wished. He was a little ripple in a large pool called America. In death he was reduced to just a ‘thin red circle in the water.’ Gatsby’s murder and the discovery of the body of Wilson, who killed him, symbolize the death of Gatsby’s dream.

Most of those reports were a nightmare – grotesque, circumstantial, eager, and untrue. When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade – but Catherine, who might have said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount of character about it too – looked at the coroner with determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers, and swore that her sister had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it, and cried into her handkerchief, as if the very suggestion was more than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a man ‘deranged by grief,’ in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, Following Gatsby’s death journalists spread rumors about his relationship with Myrtle and George Wilson. Myrtle’s sister Catherine allowed Gatsby to retain a little respect and dignity after he died, she claimed that Myrtle never cheated on Wilson. So the case was wrapped up as Wilson going crazy and killing a man.

He broke off defiantly. ‘What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.’
There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9. Tom Buchanan confesses to Nick Carraway that he was the one who had spoken to Wilson about Myrtle’s death on the day Wilson murdered Gatsby. Tom put the blame on Gatsby, unaware it was Daisy, not Gatsby, who ran over Myrtle. Nick doesn’t tell Tom it was Daisy at the wheel, and lies to protect her.
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