Jay Gatsby was the main character , the protagonist, to use a literary term, of The Great Gatsby. If this is true, Gatsby not only socialized with the wealthy residents of East Egg, but he also hung out with dangerous gangsters and members of the mafia, who ran bootlegging gigs at the time. During the s, Prohibition was in full force. The 18th Amendment went into effect in , thus banning the creation and sale of alcohol.
In many areas of the United States, it was illegal to possess and drink any form of booze as well. So, those who wanted a drink turned to illegal means. Speakeasies , illegal underground bars sprang up in secretive locations.
Members of the mafia, like Al Capone, controlled bootleggers, people who made illegal liquor. Booze came in over the Great Lakes from Canada, and people, most of whom worked for gangsters, delivered it. Why is The Great Gatsby a banned book? Is The Great Gatsby a dream or a lie? Did Daisy actually love Gatsby? Why is The Great Gatsby so sad? Is Gatsby good or bad? Is Gatsby depressed?
What color is the car that kills Myrtle? Did Jay Gatsby kill anyone? Who did Gatsby kill? Unable to sleep a premonition of bad things to come he heads to Gatsby's who is returning from his all-night vigil outside Daisy's house.
Nick, always a bit more levelheaded and sensitive to the world around him than the other characters, senses something large is about to happen. Although he can't put his finger on it, his moral sense pulls him to Gatsby's. Upon his arrival, Gatsby seems genuinely surprised his services were not necessary outside Daisy's house, showing again just how little he really knows her.
As the men search Gatsby's house for cigarettes, the reader learns more about both Nick and Gatsby. Nick moves further and further from the background to emerge as a forceful presence in the novel, showing genuine care and concern for Gatsby, urging him to leave the city for his own protection.
Throughout the chapter, Nick is continually pulled toward his friend, anxious for reasons he can't exactly articulate. Whereas Nick shows his true mettle in a flattering light in this chapter, Gatsby doesn't fare as well.
He becomes weaker and more helpless, despondent in the loss of his dream. It is as if he refuses to admit that the story hasn't turned out as he intended. He refuses to acknowledge that the illusion that buoyed him for so many years has vanished, leaving him hollow and essentially empty.
As the men search Gatsby's house for the elusive cigarettes, Gatsby fills Nick in on the real story. For the first time in the novel, Gatsby sets aside his romantic view of life and confronts the past he has been trying to run from, as well as the present he has been trying to avoid. Daisy, it turns out, captured Gatsby's love largely because "she was the first 'nice' girl he had ever known. Although he doesn't admit it, his love affair with Daisy started early, when he erroneously defined her not merely by who she was, but by what she had and what she represented.
All through the early days of their courtship, however, Gatsby tormented himself with his unworthiness, knowing "he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident," although he led Daisy to believe he was a man of means. Although his original intention was to use Daisy, he found out that he was incapable of doing so. When their relation became intimate, he still felt unworthy, and with the intimacy, Gatsby found himself wedded, not to Daisy directly, but to the quest to prove himself worthy of her.
How sad that Gatsby's judgment is so clouded with societal expectation that he can't see that a young, idealistic man who has passion, drive, and persistence is worth more than ten Daisys put together.
In loving Daisy, it turns out, Gatsby was trapped. On one hand, he loved her and she loved him, or more precisely, he loved what he envisioned her to be and she loved the persona he presented to her — and therein lies the rub.
Both Daisy and Gatsby were in love with projected images and while Daisy didn't realize this at first, Gatsby did, and it forced him more directly into his dream world. After the war in which Gatsby really did excel , Gatsby could have returned home to Daisy.
The only difficulty with that, however, would have been that in being with Daisy, he would run the risk of being exposed as an imposter. So, rather than risk having his dream disintegrate in front of him, he perpetuated his illusion by studying at Oxford before heading back to the States.
Daisy's letters begged him to return, not understanding why he wasn't rushing back to be with her. This conventional sort of murder has an honored tradition in American literature, and its lesser masters include Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, Raymond Chandler, all of whom were considered purveyors of pulp fiction in their day but whose work has now been enshrined in the Library of America.
Murder is their special subject, and their principal traffic runs to crimes of limitless avarice and uncontrollable sexual passion. The most famous novel of this lot is probably Hammett's The Maltese Falcon , its celebrity greatly enhanced by the film version directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart as the San Francisco private eye Sam Spade.
The eponymous bird is a foot-high golden statue encrusted with precious jewels, a gift from the chivalric Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem to their benefactor Emperor Charles V in the 16th century. The object has changed hands many times over the centuries, and for years its splendor has been concealed under a coat of black paint or enamel. One owner who was aware of its immense value was murdered in Paris and the statue stolen, and for the 17 years since then, Casper Gutman, "the fat man," has been chasing it down, with cohorts who are really murderous competitors also in pursuit.
In Hammett's world of perpetual moral gloom, where the strong take what they can and the weak yield or go to the wall, ownership is a matter of cunning and main force.
The moral of Hammett's story is clear and simple: Murder will out, and murder will beget murder. As the novel ends, Spade hears that Gutman has been shot and killed by his sometime bodyguard. Where Hammett writes of lethal greed, James Cain writes of blood-soaked lust. In The Postman Always Rings Twice , published in , the drifter Frank Chambers, who tells the tale, finds a job at the California hotel, diner, and gas station owned by Nick Papadakis.
Events move quickly. On page six, when Nick's wife, Cora, serves Frank supper, the more potent appetite drives out the lesser: "Her dress fell open for a second, so I could see her leg. When she gave me the potatoes, I couldn't eat. Serious vomiting tells him this is something like love, if not exactly that: "I wanted that woman so bad I couldn't even keep anything on my stomach.
It becomes clear in a hurry that Nick is going to have to die. On page 15, Nick falls in the bathtub and cracks his skull when the lovers put the lights out and Cora wallops her husband with a homemade blackjack, but the resilient Greek survives the supposed accident.
The perfect victim never suspects any foul play. Twenty pages later, when the three of them are out for a ride in the car, Frank brains Nick with a wrench, the lovers send the car plunging down a ravine with Nick's body in it, and then, before they arrange some convincing injuries for themselves, they have at it with all their might. There is nothing for the libido like a murder jointly executed: "Hell could have opened for me then, and it wouldn't have made any difference.
I had to have her, if I hung for it. I had her. The authorities have their suspicions and press to nail the pair. Legal prestidigitation of genius settles everything in the couple's favor.
They have money now, and they have each other. Their foremost desire is to put the murder as far behind them as possible and live out a middle-class fairytale. Cora gets pregnant, they marry, and a new life opens before them. But then she feels sick after an ocean swim, and as Frank is rushing her to the hospital, he crashes the car into a culvert wall, and Cora is killed.
The district attorney who failed to convict them the first time now argues that they did kill the Greek for the insurance money and that Frank then murdered Cora so he could have it all to himself.
Acquitted when he was guilty, he is convicted when he is innocent. The judge said he would give me exactly the same consideration he would show any other mad dog. The brutal account ends on a note of high sentiment: "Here they come.
Father McConnell says prayers help. If you've got this far, send up one for me, and Cora, and make it that we're together, wherever it is. Postman is very much an old-school story, but an encounter that Frank Chambers has with a fellow death-row inmate points to the new wave forming in American murder:. There's a guy in No. I asked him what that meant, and he says you got two selves, one that you know about and the other that you don't know about, because it's subconscious.
It shook me up. Did I really do it, and not know it? God Almighty, I can't believe that! I didn't do it. I loved her so, then, I tell you, that I would have died for her! To hell with the subconscious.
I don't believe it. It's just a lot of hooey, that this guy thought up so he could fool the judge. You know what you're doing, and you do it. It used to be as simple as that last sentence would have it. But psychopathology soon became the key element in the fictional annals of murder, and the psychopath, the sociopath, and the uncontrollable psychotic would stalk the imaginations of readers, moviegoers, and watchers of television crime dramas for decades to come.
Questions of guilt, innocence, and responsibility would prove ever more vexed. Patricia Highsmith's distinguished literary career rests on the pathological case. Though she is best known for her Tom Ripley novels, which feature an elegant and attractive sociopath who kills for the sake of the finer things in life, her masterpiece is Strangers on a Train , in which death holds no terror but rather has an irresistible fascination for Charles Anthony Bruno, a wealthy idler and certifiable madman who wants to do everything possible before he dies.
High on his bucket list is the perfect murder. He meets the young architect Guy Haines on a train and proposes a scheme of insane audacity: Bruno will murder Guy's loathsome wife, Miriam, who is pregnant with another man's child and has no intention of granting Guy a divorce, and to return the favor Guy will murder Bruno's hated father. A late-night phone call seals the deal, in Bruno's mind anyway; when Guy hears Miriam is dead he wonders whether Bruno could really be crazy enough to have made good on his proposal.
In due course, Bruno tells Guy that he did it, and that he expects Guy to do the honorable thing and reciprocate.
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