The first thing that gets our attention in the passage is the word “rotten. ” It seems that Nick is referring to Tom and Daisy. His following comment appears to imply that he prefers to hang out with Gatsby more, than them and, that, he likes him more. “Rotten” is a word, which is usually connected with things that are bad or have gone bad, like tomatoes. Something that is rotten is something that you don’t want to eat, otherwise you’ll get sick or it will leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Gatsby’s parties are occasion in which many morally corrupt individuals gather to do careless deeds. The car crash at Gatsby’s party is done on accident. The accident was an act of carelessness caused by the intoxication of the individuals. The parties are used by Fitzgerald to depict the social gatherings that the high-class individuals attend with no regard for anything or anyone. They live their lives in accordance with materials and have no care for anything except money. Daisy and Tom Buchanan embody a morally duplicitous, aimless, dreamless and drifting existence.
Nick writes of them that “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. ” They represent all that is wrong with the American Dream; they are rich, but they have no true friends, they are unhappy, restless. Whenever they are in trouble, they have the money and the lack of morality to just move on: “they were careless people, Tom and Daisy ? they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or vast carelessness. Nick talks about Tom and Daisy in that way because they live complicated lives. Tom is involved with Myrtle and has a separate life set up with her, while Daisy is involved with Gatsby and has other duties to attend to, such as being the mother of the child she shares with Tom.
At the same time, Gatsby doesn’t have a clean past, so maybe Nick wasn’t referring to them as people but as something else. Daisy Buchanan, Tom’s wife, is a careless individual, who could be characterized a “dumb blonde. Though it mentions that Daisy never drank, on the day before her wedding she was “as drunk as a monkey. ” The alcohol can be used as a tool of moral corruption. She debated marrying Tom or waiting for Gatsby to return from the war, but her “carelessness” and moral corruption and materialism lead to her marriage of Tom. Her life, from then on, was nothing more than a life of a materialism and carelessness. Then when Nick mentions how they looked at each as if they were “in ecstatic cahoots…all the time,” it makes you think about how much Nick must dislike Gatsby.
It still doesn’t seem like he does, though, because he was the final piece of the puzzle in getting Gatsby and Daisy together. There had to be a time when they were at one point or other in agreement, although I don’t think that they were always agreeing with each other. Toward the end of the paragraph, in which we see Nick’s thoughts, he talks of Gatsby’s “incorruptible” dream, which seems like an oxymoron because Gatsby’s dream is corrupted. His dream was to be wealthy and lead a life of wealth, complete with Daisy as his wealthy wife, though he becomes wealthy through corrupt means.
