Tuesday, August 11, 2009

In The Great Gatsby, what is Jordan Baker's conflict and how does she deal with it?

Jordan Baker's conflict seems to be whether or not to have an actual relationship with Nick Carraway.  He is not her type.  Nick tells us that she "instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men" because she "wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage."  He also describes her as a liar, and this is probably another reason that she avoids really astute men: a discerning man would be able to tell when she's lying, and Nick can tell, so we'd likely expect her to avoid a relationship with someone of his intelligence.  She confesses, though, that she likes him at the end of Chapter III.  


Then, in Chapter VIII, after the nasty business between Gatsby and Tom and Daisy in the city, as well as Myrtle's death, Jordan and Nick talk on the phone.  He says that her voice is usually "cool, as if a divot from a green golf-links had come sailing in at the office window," but today, it was "harsh and dry."  In their conversation, she claims that Nick wasn't very nice to her the night before but she admits to wanting to see him now.  When he is unwilling to drop his plans for the day to see her, she turns icy with a cold, "Very well."  She seems hurt, and perhaps regretful.  She has broken with her typical pattern of dating rather inept men, and the decision is coming back to bite her now.  


The couple speak once more in the final chapter, and Jordan tells Nick that she's engaged to someone else, though he doesn't believe her.  It seems like a ploy to prove her claim that she doesn't "give a damn about [him] now," and because she references the fact that he was the one to "throw [her] over" it sounds even more like she's bitter about being rejected.  I think Jordan was always at war with herself about how much of herself to give, how far she should let him in, and she seems never to have chosen right.  In the end, she deals with her rejection by trying to wound him and protect herself by saying she doesn't care about him anymore.

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