The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby: Flashbacks 2 key examples

Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Gatsby's Origin Story:

After a newspaper reporter arrives at Gatsby’s mansion to try to interview him, the novel flashes back to tell the story of Gatsby’s past:

James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career [...]

So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Gatsby's Romance:

The morning after Gatsby hides in the bushes outside Tom and Daisy’s house, watching the couple have dinner, the narrative flashes back as Gatsby tells Nick about his and Daisy’s past relationship:

[Daisy] was the first “nice” girl [Gatsby] had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people, but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him—he had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity, was that Daisy lived there—it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him.

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