To “tell … God's truth” he raises his right hand - isn't that taking the truth a little too seriously? When speaking of loss he pauses in the right place indeed, in a place so right that the addendum “all dead now” might just be bad acting, not lying. Except that Gatsby's gestures are broken, and by Gatsby himself. Gatsby, too, is gestural: as Nick Carraway would have it, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him” (p. “Epic theatre is gestural,” wrote Walter Benjamin of Brecht. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.ĭoes Gatsby know where San Francisco is? If he does, his response is an odd gesture. His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. “My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.” “What part of the Middle West? ” I inquired casually. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him, after all.
He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. He looked at me sideways - and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West - all dead now. “I'll tell you God's truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by.
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