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.
Bruno turns up the pressure, sending Guy the floor plan of his father's house, procedural instructions, and a pistol to kill the old man. Bruno terrifies Guy, who fears what Anne Faulkner, the woman he loves and wants to marry, would think of him if she knew what he has been hiding from her. Marry him? How could she?
What sort of beast was he that he could sit in a room where a bottom drawer held plans for a murder and the gun to do it with? Bruno stalks Guy, and the prolonged tension breaks Guy's resistance. Respectable ordinary men too can be driven to kill, in order to protect their respectability. One night, Guy goes out and commits the necessary murder. Guy cannot stop thinking of what he has done, and eventually the murder runs together in his mind with his masterly accomplishment as an architect, in the seductive dance of Nietzschean amor fati.
But, on the other hand, who could be more genuinely humble than one who felt compelled to obey the laws of his own fate? The murder that had seemed an outrageous departure, a sin against himself, he believed now might have been a part of his destiny, too. It was impossible to think otherwise. The hell-bent egotism of this line of thinking is its own form of psychopathology: the mania of the controlling idea.
An excess of Nietzsche in the brain has rocketed a good many unfortunates into this sort of madness. As Bruno is out sailing with Guy, Anne, and their friends, in his self-infatuation, his demented pride in engineering the perfect murders, he invokes Nietzsche's most famous coinage:.
Any man doesn't think I whipped it, I'll settle with him privately! Things end badly for the supermen.
Moments after his ebullient profession of faith, Bruno falls or jumps into the water and drowns. Guy for his part delivers a Dostoevskian confession to Miriam's former lover, who is too drunk and stupid to care; and the investigator who has been tailing Guy hears the whole story from just outside the door.
This too his fate has decreed. Guy's surrender to the law "was inevitable and ordained, like the turning of the earth, and there was no sophistry by which he could free himself from it. The most notorious of murderous American supermen are Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, real-life University of Chicago undergraduates who murdered their neighbor, year-old Robert Franks, in in order to prove their superiority to what Nietzsche called "slave morality.
Meyer Levin was a contemporary of the killers at the university, and covered the murder for the Chicago Daily News ; his novel Compulsion retails this abomination committed in the thrall of an idea, and the response of law and public opinion to its enormity. The narrator, Sid Silver, is Levin's alter ego, who considers the crime from the vantage of 30 years of experience, which includes having fought in a war against "an entire nation [that]…seriously subscribe[d] to the superman code.
The fictionalized murderers, Judd Steiner and Artie Straus, sons of Jewish millionaires and sometime lovers, take satanic pride in their exceptional intelligence, and the liberation from convention that their mental daring permits them. As in Highsmith's work, and in other novels and plays in the new tradition, the murderers in their lustrous blackness of soul stand out against the civilized proprieties.
The unsolved rape and murder of another Jewish millionaire's son, Paulie Kessler, terrorizes the city, and the new fear abroad is not only of savage animals on the loose but of an unexampled pathology, a rogue bacillus that will ravage humanity:. There was a growing anxiety, a growing presage that something new and terrible and uncontrollable, some new murder-germ, was here involved. A very different fear torments Judd Steiner after the murder: that at bottom he might be ordinary, that he might want to love and marry an unexceptional girl, that he might really desire a normal life; this fear gnaws at the moral superiority that entitles him to kill with impunity.
He has to make an effort to confirm the murder experience as part of his own being" Levin's ellipsis. The authorities are able to track down the murderers because Judd lost his glasses when they dumped the body, and this haplessness only confirms his feeling that he is unworthy of so exalted a calling.
Artie was driven by some demonic force, and in himself it was not the same. Had everything, then, been a gargantuan mistake? The young men's fantasy of Nietzschean nobility is further undermined by psychiatrists testifying for the defense. The compassionate Dr. Allwin speaks of the murderers not as perps but as patients, each "'suffering from a functional disorder. Artie's could develop into dementia praecox, a splitting of the personality, and Judd's is in the direction of paranoia.
These were the philosophies of 'I want what I want. Like his tests, they proved that Judd was emotionally a child. Thus Freud displaces Nietzsche as the virtuoso of psychological and moral insight.
In the eyes of these learned doctors, the murderers' most revered authority is a grandiose charlatan. As one might expect of a University of Chicago murder, the case provokes weighty questions about human nature. George Wilson husband Catherine sister. Myrtle Wilson is an ambitious social climber, the sister of Catherine , wife of George Wilson and the mistress of Tom Buchanan.
Wilson owns a run-down garage in the Valley of Ashes. Myrtle herself possessed a fierce vitality. Unfortunately for her, she chose Tom, who treated her as a mere object of his desire. When her husband demanded to know who her lover was, she ran out of the room and onto the road. She recognized the yellow car driving by, thinking that Tom was behind the wheel.
Myrtle aspires to have a better life. To heighten the tragedy of Myrtle's death, Nick emphasized her hunger for life, frequently using the word 'vitality' to describe her. She had a 'vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering'.
Myrtl resented George because he isn't rich - he even had to borrow 'somebody's best suit to get married in'. Myrtle thought she married below her class, she said George 'wasn't fit to lick [her] balls', but she was actually working class herself.
This was clear from the way she spoke - she used non-standard grammar and 'obscene' language. Nick ridicules Myrtle's attempt to appear upper class - he describes her voice as a 'high mincing shout'.
Myrtle's focus is on improving her standing in life, and sees Tom as an escape from her current situation, ignoring and belittling her husband in the meantime. Her lack of synapses encourages the reader to see Myrtle as greedy, rather than ambitious or desperate. She naively thought that Tom will leave Daisy and clung to him despite his abuse, because of his wealth and better class status.
George Wilson and Myrtle were arguing when Myrtle then spotted a yellow car approaching. It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice," he continued. Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night The girl who was with him But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
I saw right away he was a fine appearing, gentlemanly young man, and I knew I could use him good. We were so thick like that in everything—" He held up two bulbous fingers "—always together.
Prohibition goes into effect through the passage of the 18th Amendment, which outlawed most kinds of alcohol. Prohibition spurs widespread underground organized crime represented by Meyer Wolfshiem and Gatsby in the novel. I saw them one spring in Cannes and later in and then they came back to Chicago to settle down.
I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting into a subway train. Nick decides to learn bond trading in New York. Tom takes Nick to meet Myrtle. They go to a Manhattan apartment, to a small party that ends with Tom punching Myrtle in the face for talking about Daisy. We know the exact date because Nick notes that it was two days before the 4th of July holiday. Gatsby's notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news.
I hadn't been there two minutes when somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink Tom and a man named Sloane and a pretty woman in a brown riding habit" 6. So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes. Daisy invites Nick and Gatsby for lunch at her house. She and Gatsby plan to reveal their love to Tom, but instead in the unbearably hot day, the group decides to go to Manhattan to the Plaza Hotel. Daisy is unwilling to completely renounce Tom, which decimates Gatsby.
Daisy decides to stay with Tom. I can't help what's past. Nick runs into Tom in Manhattan, where Tom confesses to telling Wilson that Gatsby was driving the car that killed Myrtle. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon.
Nick writes the story about Gatsby and that fateful summer - this story is the novel that we are reading. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.
The whole novel is basically Nick's furious journaling about his formative summer. If you're writing a character analysis , or comparing two characters to each other , it may help to have those characters' biographies separate from the novel as a whole. Read our summary of the novel's plot in the order that it happens. Use your newfound understanding of the characters' lives to get more meaning out of our overview of the characters or dive deeper with our detailed character analyses.
Learn the background of and context for the novel in our explanations of the history of the composition of the book and the biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:.
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