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Get every literary device explanation for The Great GatsbyPlus so much more...
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Foreshadowing
Explanation and Analysis—The Car Accident:
There are several moments in the novel that foreshadow Myrtle Wilson’s death in a car accident. The first is an earlier accident that happens after one of Gatsby’s parties in Chapter 3:
Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side up, but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupe which had left Gatsby’s drive not two minutes before.
The wrecked car, which a drunk man has driven into a ditch, is “violently shorn of one wheel.” This foreshadows the later image of Myrtle’s “left breast [...] swinging loose like a flap” after Daisy strikes and kills Myrtle with Gatsby’s car.
More foreshadowing happens soon after this in Chapter 3, when Jordan Baker nearly hits some workers on the road but insists that preventing an accident is the pedestrian’s responsibility as well as the driver’s:
“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”
This attitude echoes Daisy’s choice to drive away after hitting Myrtle rather than stopping to help her. Daisy, like Jordan, refuses to take accountability for her actions, even allowing Gatsby to take the blame for the accident.
The final instance of foreshadowing happens in Chapter 7, just before Myrtle is killed. Nick reflects on the moment when he, Tom, and Jordan drive off separately from Gatsby and Daisy:
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
This line comes just after Nick remembers that it’s his 30th birthday, and so the idea of figuratively “dr[iving] on toward death” signifies Nick grappling with his own mortality as he enters his thirties. But it can also be read as Tom, Nick, and Jordan literally “dr[iving] on toward death,” as it foreshadows the imminent car accident that the three of them are going to come across on their way back to Long Island.
All in all, then, other characters’ reckless driving and musings about mortality foreshadow Myrtle’s death in a hit-and-run, emphasizing the inevitability of death and also pessimistically suggesting that people’s carelessness can usher in death prematurely.
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