The improvement in technology

The improvement in technology Introduction The past decade has seen business trends receive a great upgrade due to the influx of technology. The improvement in technology has greatly affected the methods means and manner in which businesses choose to conduct their activities. Technology has been the greatest determinant of business growth for a variety of reasons.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on The improvement in technology specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More The better technology the industry has, the greater the computing power and in effect the faster, persuasive and competitive the product becomes. Technology facilitates an effective harness of talent, resources and ideas from the organisations structure (Boorsma Wolfgang 2007, p9). Today the influx of virtual business enabled by various technological business modules and vehicles has created a new approach to decision-making as well as business-to-business marketing. It would be difficult to ignore the prevalence of business modules such as Facebook which have flourished through social networking to secure a subscriber network of over 400 million people across the globe. Driven by a cost cutting objective technology continues to present new deployment methods which are aimed at reducing the cost of acquisition, maintenance as well upgrade of the technology adopted. This has made them a more attractive option as compared to alternative models and approaches to doing business. Cloud computing for example has opened a window of opportunities for majority if not all business players by offering new approaches to the concept of demand and supply. The consumer on his part is provided a variety of ways to derive utility from products, the entrepreneur also get an opportunity to expand their expansion ambitions to new markets breaching the geographical and structural limitations (Boorsma Wolfgang 2007, p9). Companies and businesses therefore have to make important decisions on how much investment to make in technology and in the transformation of the business models to harness new opportunities presented by new technology Markets operating a business-to-business model are characterised by a rather long and complicated buying process that is complicated further by the high costs of operation involved. It therefore follows that the model demands a fare share of objective and purposeful personalised communication. Traditionally the communication models used have been the face-to-face approach due to their convenience speed and immediate response ability.Advertising Looking for essay on other technology? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More They have also been commonly used due to their flexibility in delivery of the message. The parties can customize the message to accommodate a change in circumstance as well as new circumstances. This is greatly attributed to the oligopolistic nature of these ma rkets presenting a highly imbalanced seller to buyer ration. These aspects have been responsible for the general trend and direction of the business-to-business models. As De Pelsmacker et al (2004, p59) puts it the general trend has been to focus on personal selling alongside trade shows as the central marketing elements. Others suggest alternatives methods such as advertisements in business journals as the most appropriate methods of informing the consumer of the availability of a specific brand for their choosing and purchase. Despite the effectiveness of these methods however the emergence of new business marketing methods and options such as direct mail, online market strategies as well as database management have created a great indifference for managers and executives. They have to make investment decisions between expensive technologies that have a promise of high results and run the risk of obsolesce of the technology as opposed to sticking to the traditional methods of mar keting and consumer outreach approaches. I will examine how the emerging technology and communication has affected the business-to-business buying process and decision-making. Argument A long-standing measure of a successful entrepreneur is their ability to organise groups of market participants to create a market. The influx of technology has created a reliable and viable method of doing just that through the internet in the context of internet marketing. The digital revolution has infected the marketing process with a wave of transformation that has progressively increased over the past few years. The digital influence on the various market and market players has fuelled an enthusiasm that is directed at the various digital options and choices in business models. This revolution has also been of great help to entrepreneurs and sellers who get an opportunity to centralise their efforts to embrace the consumer based business models. This therefore increases their level of consumer s ervice by blending various digital options and elements. Digital marketing is however very different from internet marketing and is often but erroneously mistaken to mean the latter. Generally, internet marketing is a typical example of digital marketing since the tools of digital marketing include the internet alongside other related tools such as television channels, cell phones as well as wireless networks and connections.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on The improvement in technology specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More These tools if well employed have a great capacity to influence the buyer’s decision on whether to buy or not to buy or not. The buyer will be more convinced by a good presentation format that is technologically compliant with the recent trends that relate with them and express a futuristic impression. This however requires great monetary investment as well as strict and proper management to be able to achieve results. The technology for example must be compatible with the organisations goals objectives and strategy to avoid conflict and retrogressive or irrelevant technologies. As such, innovation in technology keeps presenting new opportunities and methods of engagement in the buying process and decision-making. This however comes at its own cost. From open source software developers to social network streamers such as Facebook and Twitter the market has switched digital. The open source websites boast of over 68 million bloggers who participate in product evaluation and in the distribution of product information. Customer relations have therefore been greatly enhanced through digital innovation. The players in the business-to-business market have an opportunity to instantly respond to each other’s questions fears and suggestions. A company therefore, lowers the cost of serving its customers by investing in an operational and suitable Web based customer service s olution. This option allows the company to monitor its performance through the number of complains or complementary comments it receives through the customer service tool. Innovation in technology has gone an extra mile by offering a word of mouth Web based marketing option that allows buyers to share their experience with the specific product for others to see and hear. Sellers on the other hand get to explain verbatim the additional facilities offered by their product over and above their competitors (Immelt, Govindarajan Trimble 2009, p57). In the near future therefore the buy or sell decision will greatly rely on how good the technology conveys the information between the participants of such a market. Technology therefore has created an opportunity to tap into communities and create value from the formed groupings. This therefore implies that companies must comprehensively research before engaging with a potential service provider in relation to technology.Advertising Looking for essay on other technology? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More Successful communication is a two way process with feed forward and feedback. Technology has also facilitated communication between the buyers and sellers by allowing the parties to supply feedback on the various concerns raised by the participants. This maintains a continuing participation and stimulates the level of commitment by the parties to the buying and selling decisions. As previously discussed, technology has allowed organisations to breach their limits in manpower, resource and geography through technological implements. Research suggests that this attribute of technological influence taps into a world of talent allowing companies to sustain flexibility and create volatility in business relations. Technology has rendered the market more porous allowing companies to work above the constraints of corporate infrastructure. In the past, this has been seen to work very well especially during the economic recession that left most companies with few workable option thereby causi ng companies to push for sustainable networks (Gawer 2010). Typically, the quality of talent an organisation can access in resolving technical client problems would be constrained by the company’s resources being structural and economic. An engineering company for instance,is only as good as its best engineer and therefore it can only be as good as the best salary it can offer to its engineers as the best ones come at a price. Technology has however made it easier for a manager to map knowledge sources with information hubs and a worldwide staff. This facilitates better utilisation of talent and increases the quality of unit innovation among its operation units. The various projects a manager undertakes are therefore authorised and assessed by the best of the best among experts in the specific specialty through the global network. This approach draws input from all calibres of employees ranging from fresh graduates to retirees. A good example of these labour markets is the Me chanical Turk courtesy of Amazon.com which specializes in selling expertise and consultancy as well as problem solving (Prahalad 2009). Despite this advantage and growth potential, management conservatism and bureaucracy still confines most companies to the talent and quality of its full time employees whose limits go only as far as the organisations’ structure. Technological advancement and innovation continue to offer new options every other day. In the near future, these options will be too many and the big question will be one of collaboration. It is important to ensure that any such engaged resource is exploited to its full potential. Essentially different innovations have different potential and capacities. The efficiency however depends on the collaboration of resources in the organisation. The collaboration leads to economies of scale and capacity. Teleconferencing and video conferencing for example has worked as a cost effective tool that saves on time and travel cos ts for the selling managers and business consultants. It also allows for more flexibility in the organisations capacity. The buyer’s decision to buy is therefore greatly influenced by convincing the sales executive in the video conference session. The buying process therefore still maintains an aspect of the interpersonal contact and dimension. In any buying process, the participants will always be concerned about history, authenticity and a promise of future consistency in service delivery. The transactions need to be authenticated to create assurance and confidence. The traditional approach would be for the participants to test, see or try the commodity before buying. Technology has facilitated automation of this process through the adoption of the radiofrequency identification and similar technologies. These create an information system that has assets in the form of elements of the system. One good such example is in the insurance industry where a company can keep account of the driver’s behaviour for the purpose of evaluation of their risk profile and for the purpose of payment of compensation should the risk materialize (Barabasi 2009). Technology has increased the accessories of the buying decision by allowing parties to offer guarantees of safety and an assurance of quality. More advanced innovation has enabled proactive action in luxury automobiles to engage intelligent action just before an accident occurs. In the medical industry the innovation has created an opportunity for cheaper more effective medical surveillance and protective mechanism against diseases and preventable illnesses. The process involves body implants that keep a record of body changes for the purpose of medical adjustments and medical prescription observation and supervision. The information collected allows for a more proper diagnosis of body problems. This not only guarantees the authenticity of products in the buying process but also guarantees safety. A good buy decision relies on the level of information relied on by the decision maker. This information would ordinarily be available only if gathered manually from the field or through trial and experimentation. These however are timely and expensive engagements that need not be undertaken thanks to technological innovation. Commonly referred to as the â€Å"big data,† the information system alternative offers access to smart assets for the buyer to choose from coupled with product information to facilitate their evaluation and information to ensure that the buyer’s expectations are adequately met. This allows the buyer to evaluate different product combinations at a lower cost as opposed to physical examination and testing or sampling. Technology has also allowed specialists, analysts and marketers to conduct purpose based trials and experiments on product combinations depending on customer expectations. The customers’ expectations are gathered from the social media we bsites and product review search engines. The experiment involves putting product combination for the discussion review and evaluation by the consumers (Thomke 2001, p66). Their responses through blogs and comments on these websites create a rating mechanism for these product combinations. These have also been used to adjust prices on a periodic basis to conform to the prevailing circumstances and the data provided by real-time data monitors on social media. From a corporate responsibility perspective, the buying process in certain circumstances caused environmental stress. This is partially due to the depletion of the existing resources and partially due to the waste generated by the process. Technology has facilitated a change in the level of responsibility of the participants of the business market by offering environmental friendly alternatives that go towards conservation and preservation of resources. The green data movement for instance, creates an opportunity to conserve ene rgy by developing environmental friendly implements that have automated energy saving mechanisms. Undeniably, the responsibility to preserve the environment falls on all and every stakeholder. Technology has therefore facilitated the principles of sustainability in the buying process by facilitating cost sharing and harmonised action (McAfee 2009). The mitigation mechanisms offered by technology also provide a quantity analysis. This information can be used in the monitoring supervision and reporting of the benefits as weighed against the damage contributed by information technology. Every company looks to reduce its fixed costs which account for the least possible price they can quote for the consumer. Business to business customers specifically invest in cost cutting alternatives and are more willing to maintain a cost as variable and terminable as opposed to a determinate fixed cost. Transport for instance, can be fixed or variable depending on the approach adopted. If a consumer acquires a bus they write it off as a fixed cost distributed evenly over the useful life of the product. In the alternative, technology has allowed for a re- evaluation of this product into a service where the consumer can acquire the purpose of the product as opposed to the physical product its self. The input of technology has allowed companies such as City Carshare to create a value added market for transportation services as an alternative to the purchase of transport equipment. The transportation service is easier to a count for and is more reliable and takes a corporate value approach. The cost then changes to a variable cost, which is adjusted on a periodic basis. It is also a more economical approach since the service is only paid for when it is rendered and it is paid for in the same measure of utility. This has changed the business-to-business concept through outsourcing which draws from the indefinite global resource. Transactions and business decisions gain value throug h interaction and exchange of information and communication. The traditional business model relies on the face-to-face interaction communication and information exchange. Technology has however transformed the business-to-business model to a multisided business model from a two-side model by allowing a three-way transaction. The advertising aspect in a newspaper allows newspapers to generate their revenue while still offering the users content. This creates a reliable market of defined sellers and many consumers in which case the consumers are segmented based on the side of the transaction and the benefit they expect to derive (Carr 2009). Relevance and suitability of a product are serious considerations in the buying decision. Therefore, the appropriateness of a service or product to a specific consumer environment and circumstance goes a long way in persuading the consumer to acquire or purchase the product. Technology has allowed the business-to-business communication process to adjust to the specific situations and circumstances through different user interfaces that adjust in language circumstance and conditions. The financial sector business to business model has greatly advanced in rural Africa through retail banking under the M-Pesa module that offers a connection between bank accounts and cell phones allowing up to 8 million to access banking services. The use of virtual cash services allows the users to access funds even in remote areas by visiting licensed shops. It is also a multisided method that allows companies to transfer funds to each other and to their employees and from employees to the companies and institutions such as banks (Bryan Joyce 2007). Conclusion The future of technology in business is bright as new methods of operation and interaction continue to emerge. The impact of technology on business transactions and decisions will also continue to gradually increase creating a dependent relationship in regard to decision making choice an d preference (Brynjolfsson Saunders 2009). Technology creates a capacity and opportunity for competitive advantage. The message is clear, organisations should acknowledge the role if innovation and technology in the business process as a strategy towards growth and competitive advantage (Malone 2004). References Barabasi A 2009, How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life, Plume, New York. Boorsma, B Wolfgang W 2007, ‘Connected urban development, Innovation for sustainability’, NATOA Journal, Volume 15, Number 4, pp.5–9. Bryan, L, Joyce C, 2007, Mobilizing Minds, Creating Wealth from Talent in the 21st-Century Organization, McGraw-Hill, New York. Brynjolfsson, E., Saunders, A 2009, Wired for Innovation, How Information Technology is Reshaping the Economy, The MIT Press, Cambridge. Carr, N 2009, The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, Norton Company, New York. De Pelsmacker, P., Geuens, M. Van den Bergh, J 2004, Marketing communications: a European perspective. Pearson Education. Essex. Gawer A 2010, Platforms, Markets and Innovation, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham. Immelt, R., Govindarajan, V Trimble, C 2009, ‘How GE is disrupting itself’, Harvard Business Review, Volume 87, Number 10, pp. 56–65. Malone, T 2004, The Future of Work, How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life, MA, Harvard Business Press, Cambridge. McAfee, A 2009, Enterprise 2.0, New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge. Prahalad, C 2009, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, Wharton School Publishing, Philadelphia. Thomke, S 2001, ‘Enlightened experimentation, The new imperative for innovation’, Harvard Business Review, Volume 79, Number 2, pp. 66–75.

Best Summary and Analysis The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8

Best Summary and Analysis The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8 SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips In Great GatsbyChapter 8, things go from very bad to much, much worse. There’s an elegiac tone to half of the story in Chapter 8, as Nick tells us about Gatsby giving up on his dreams of Daisy and reminiscing about his time with her five years before. The other half of the chapter is all police thriller, as we hear Michaelis describe Wilson coming unglued and deciding to take bloody revenge for Myrtle’s death. Get ready for bittersweetness and gory shock, in thisThe Great GatsbyChapter 8 summary. Quick Note on Our Citations Our citation format in this guide is (chapter.paragraph). We're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book. To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of chapter; 50-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text. The Great Gatsby: Chapter 8 Summary That night Nick has trouble sleeping. He feels like he needs to warn Gatsby about something. When he meets up with Gatsby at dawn, Gatsby tells Nick nothing happened outside Daisy’s house all night.Gatsby’s house feels strangely enormous. It’s also poorly kept - dusty, unaired, and unusually dark. Nick advises Gatsby to lay low somewhere else so that his car isn’t found and linked to the accident. But Gatsby is unwilling to leave his lingering hopes for Daisy.Instead, Gatsby tells Nick about his background - the information Nick told us in Chapter 6. Gatsby's narrative begins with the description of Daisy as the first wealthy, upper-class girl Gatsby had ever met. He loved her huge beautiful house and the fact that many men had loved her before him. All of this made him see her as a prize. He knew that since he was poor, he shouldn’t really have been wooing her, but he slept with her anyway, under the false pretenses that he and she were in the same social class. Gatsby realized that he was in love with Daisy and was surprised to see that Daisy fell in love with him too.They were together for a month before Gatsby had to leave for the war in Europe. He was successful in the army, becoming a major. After the war he ended up at Oxford, unable to return to Daisy. Meanwhile, Daisy re-entered the normal rhythm of life: lavish living, snobbery, lots of dates, and all-night parties. Gatsby sensed from her letters that she was annoyed at having to wait for him, and instead wanted to finalize what her life would be like. The person who finalized her life in a practical way that made sense was Tom. Gatsby interrupts his narrative to again say that there’s no way that Daisy ever loved Tom - well, maybe for a second right after the wedding, tops, but that’s it. Then he goes back to his story, which concludes after Daisy's wedding to Tom.When Gatsbycame back from Oxford, Daisy and Tom were still on their honeymoon. Gatsby felt like the best thing in his life had disappeared forever. After breakfast, Gatsby’s gardener suggests draining the pool, but Gatsby wants to keep it filled since he hasn’t yet used it. Gatsby still hopes that Daisy will call him. Nick thanks Gatsby for the hospitality, pays him the backhanded compliment of saying that he is better than the â€Å"rotten crowd† of upper-class people (backhanded because it's setting the bar pretty low to be better than "rotten" people), and leaves to go to work. At work, Nick gets a phone call from Jordan, who is upset that Nick didn’t pay sufficient attention to her the night before. Nick is floored by this selfishness - after all, someone died, so how could Jordan be so self-involved!They hang up on each other, clearly broken up. Nick tries to call Gatsby, but is told by the operator that the line is being kept free for a phone call from Detroit (which might actually be Gatsby's way of clearing the line in case Daisy calls? It's unclear).On the way back from the city, Nick purposefully sits on the side of the train car that won’t face Wilson’s garage. Nick now tells us what happened at the garage after he, Tom, and Jordan drove away the day before. Since he wasn't there, he's most likely recapping Michaelis's inquest statement. They found Myrtle’s sister too drunk to understand what had happened to Myrtle. Then she fainted and had to be taken away. Michaelis sat with Wilson until dawn, listening to Wilson talk about the yellow car that had run Myrtle over, and how to find it. Michaelis suggested that Wilson talk to a priest, but Wilson showed Michaelis an expensive dog leash that he found. To him, this was incontrovertible proof of her affair and the fact that her lover killed Myrtle on purpose. Wilson said that Myrtle was trying to run out to talk to the man in the car, while Michaelis believed that she had been trying to flee the house where Wilson had locked her up. Wilson had told Myrtle that God could see everything she was doing. The God he’s talking about? The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburgon the billboard near the garage. Wilson seemed calm, so Michaelis went home to sleep. By the time he came back to the garage, Wilson was gone. Wilson walked all the way to West Egg, asking about the yellow car. That afternoon, Gatsby gets in his pool for the first time that summer. He is still waiting for a call from Daisy. Nick tries to imagine what it must have been like to be Gatsby and know that your dream was lost. Gatsby’s chauffeur hears gunshots just as Nick pulls up to the house. In the pool, they see Gatsby’s dead body, and a little way off in the grass, they see Wilson’s body. Wilson has shot Gatsby and then himself. So the moral of the story is, if you have a nice pool, try to use it more often. Key Chapter 8 Quotes She was the first "nice" girl he 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 himhe had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived thereit was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year's shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisyit increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions. (8.10) The reason the word â€Å"nice† is in quotation marks is that Gatsby does not mean that Daisy is the first pleasant or amiable girl that he has met. Instead, the word â€Å"nice† here means refined, having elegant and elevated taste, picky and fastidious. In other words, from the very beginning what Gatsby most values about Daisy is that she belongs to that set of society that he is desperately trying to get into: the wealthy, upper echelon. Just like when he noted the Daisy’s voice has money in it, here Gatsby almost cannot separate Daisy herself from the beautiful house that he falls in love with. Notice also how much he values quantity of any kind – it’s wonderful that the house has many bedrooms and corridors, and it’s also wonderful that many men want Daisy. Either way, it’s the quantity itself that â€Å"increases value.† It’s almost like Gatsby’s love is operating in a market economy– the more demand there is for a particular good, the higher the worth of that good. Of course, thinking in this way makes it easy to understand why Gatsby is able to discard Daisy’s humanity and inner life when he idealizes her. For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and therelike rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor. Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately-and the decision must be made by some force-of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality-that was close at hand. (8.18-19) This description of Daisy’s life apart from Gatsby clarifies why she picks Tom in the end and goes back to her hopeless ennui and passive boredom: this is what she has grown up doing and is used to. Daisy’s life seems fancy. After all, there are orchids and orchestras and golden shoes. But already, even for the young people of high society, death and decay loom large. In this passage for example, not only is the orchestra’s rhythm full of sadness, but the orchids are dying, and the people themselves look like flowers past their prime. In the midst of this stagnation, Daisy longs for stability, financial security, and routine. Tom offered that then, and he continues to offer it now. "Of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were first marriedand loved me more even then, do you see?" Suddenly he came out with a curious remark: "In any case," he said, "it was just personal." What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn't be measured? (8.24-27) Even though he can now no longer be an absolutist about Daisy’s love, Gatsby is still trying to think about her feelings on his own terms. After admitting that the fact that many men loved Daisy before him is a positive, Gatsby is willing to admit that maybe Daisy had feelings for Tomafter all, just as long as her love for Gatsby was supreme. Gatsby is ambiguous admission that â€Å"it was just personal† carries several potential meanings: Nick assumes that the word â€Å"it† refers to Gatsby’s love, which Gatsby is describing as â€Å"personal† as a way of emphasizing how deep and inexplicable his feelings for Daisy are. But of course, the word â€Å"it† could just as easily be referring to Daisy’s decision to marry Tom. In this case, what is â€Å"personal† are Daisy’s reasons (the desire for status and money), which are hers alone, and have no bearing on the love that she and Gatsby feel for each other. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for 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. (8.30) Once again Gatsby is trying to reach something that is just out of grasp, a gestural motif that recurs frequently in this novel. Here already, even as a young man, he is trying to grab hold of an ephemeral memory. "They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruptionand he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye. (8.45-46) It’s interesting that here Nick suddenly tells us that he disapproves of Gatsby. One way to interpret this is that during that fateful summer, Nickdid indeed disapprove of what he saw, but has since come to admire and respect Gatsby, and it is that respect and admiration that come through in the way he tells the story most of the time. It’s also telling that Nick sees the comment he makes to Gatsby as a compliment. At best, it is a backhanded one – he is saying that Gatsby is better than a rotten crowd, but that is a bar set very low (if you think about it, it’s like saying â€Å"you’re so much smarter than that chipmunk!† and calling that high praise). Nick’s description of Gatsby’s outfit as both â€Å"gorgeous† and a â€Å"rag† underscores this sense of condescension. The reason Nick thinks that he is praising Gatsby by saying this is that suddenly, in this moment, Nick is able to look past his deeply and sincerely held snobbery, and to admit that Jordan, Tom, and Daisy are all horrible people despite being upper crust. Still, backhanded as it is, this compliment also meant to genuinely make Gatsby feel a bit better. Since Gatsby cares so, so much about entering the old money world, it makes Nick glad to be able to tell Gatsby that he is so much better than the crowd he's desperate to join. Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool as if a divot from a green golf links had come sailing in at the office window but this morning it seemed harsh and dry. "I've left Daisy's house," she said. "I'm at Hempstead and I'm going down to Southampton this afternoon." Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy's house, but the act annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid. "You weren't so nice to me last night." "How could it have mattered then?" (8.49-53) Jordan’s pragmatic opportunism, which has so far been a positive foil to Daisy’s listless inactivity, is suddenly revealed to be an amoral and self-involved way of going through life. Instead of being affected one way or another by Myrtle’s horrible death, Jordan’s takeaway from the previous day is that Nick simply wasn’t as attentive to her as she would like. Nick is staggered by the revelation that the cool aloofness that he liked so much throughout the summer - possibly because it was a nice contrast to the girl back home that Nick thought was overly attached to their non-engagement - is not actually an act. Jordan really doesn’t care about other people, and she really can just shrug off seeing Myrtle’s mutilated corpse and focus on whether Nick was treating her right. Nick, who has been trying to assimilate this kind of thinking all summer long, finds himself shocked back into his Middle West morality here. "I spoke to her," he muttered, after a long silence. "I told her she might fool me but she couldn't fool God. I took her to the window" With an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it, "and I said 'God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me but you can't fool God!' " Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night. "God sees everything," repeated Wilson. "That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight. (8.102-105) Clearly Wilson has been psychologically shaken first by Myrtle’s affair and then by her death - he is seeing the giant eyes of the optometrist billboardas a stand-in for God. But this delusion underlines the absence of any higher power in the novel. In the lawless, materialistic East, there is no moral center which could rein in people’s darker, immoral impulses. The motif of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes runs through the novel, as Nick notes them watching whatever goes on in the ashheaps. Here, that motif comes to a crescendo. Arguably, when Michaelis dispels Wilson’s delusion about the eyes, he takes away the final barrier to Wilson’s unhinged revenge plot. If there is no moral authority watching, anything goes. No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clockuntil long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. (8.0) Nick tries to imagine what it might be like to be Gatsby, but a Gatsby without the activating dream that has spurred him throughout his life. For Nick, this would be the loss of the aesthetic sense - an inability to perceive beauty in roses or sunlight. Theideaof fall as a new, but horrifying, world of ghosts and unreal material contrasts nicely with Jordan’s earlier idea that fall brings with it rebirth. For Jordan, fall is a time of reinvention and possibility - but for Gatsby, it is literally the season of death. The Great GatsbyChapter 8 Analysis Now let's comb through this chapter to tease apart the themes that connect it to the rest of the novel. Themes and Symbols Unreliable Narrator. However much Nick has been backgrounding himself as a narrative force in the novel, in this chapter, we suddenly start to feel the heavy hand of his narration. Rather than the completely objective, nonjudgmental reporter that he has set out to be, Nick begins to edit and editorialize. First, he introduces a sense of foreboding, foreshadowing Gatsby’s death with bad dreams and ominous dread. Then, he talks about his decision to reveal Gatsby’s background not in the chronological order when he learned it, but before we heard about the argument in the hotel room. The novel is a long eulogy for a man Nick found himself admiring despite many reasons not to, so this choice to contextualize and mitigate Tom’s revelations by giving Gatsby the chance to provide context makes perfect sense. However, it calls into question Nick’s version of events, and his interpretation of the motivations of the people around him. He is a fundamentally unreliable narrator. Symbols: The Eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The absence of a church or religious figure in Wilson’s life, and his delusion that the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are a higher power, underscores how little moral clarity or prescription there is in the novel’s world. Characters are driven by emotional or material greed, by selfishness, and by a complete lack of concern about others. The people who thrive - from Wolfshiem to Jordan - do so because they are moral relativists. The people who fail - like Nick, or Gatsby, or Wilson - fail because they can’t put aside an absolutist ideal that drives their actions. The American Dream. Remember discussing variously described ambition in Chapter 6, when we saw a bunch of people on the make in different ways? In this chapter, that sense of forward momentum recurs, but in a twisted and darkly satiric way through the Terminator-like drive of Wilson to find the yellow car and its driver. He walks from Queens to West Egg for something like sixor sevenhours, finding evidence that can’t be reproduced, and using a route that can’t be retraced afterward. Unlike Gatsby, forever trying to grasp the thing out he knows well but can’t reach, Wilson homes in on a person he doesn’t know but unerringly reaches. Society and Class. By the end of this chapter, the rich and the poor are definitely separated - forever, by death. Every main character who isn’t from the upper class - Myrtle, Gatsby, and Wilson - is violently killed. On the other hand, those from the social elite - Jordan, Daisy, and Tom - can continue their lives totally unchanged. Jordan brushes these deaths off completely. Tom gets to hang on to his functionally dysfunctional marriage.AndDaisy literally gets away with murder (or at least manslaughter). Only Nick seems to be genuinely affected by what he has witnessed. He survives, but his retreat to his Midwest home marks a kind of death - the death of his romantic idea of achievement and success. Death and Failure. Rot, decay, and death are everywhere in this chapter: Gatsby’s house is in a state of almost supernatural disarray, with â€Å"inexplicable amount of dust everywhere† (8.4) after he fires his servants. Amidst the parties and gaiety of Daisy’s youth, her â€Å"dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor† (8.19). Nick’s phrase for the corruption and selfishness of the upper-class people he’s gotten to know is â€Å"rotten crowd† (8.45), people who are decomposing into garbage. Gatsby floats in a pool, trying to hang on to summer, but actually on the eve of fall, as nature around him turns â€Å"frightening,† â€Å"unfamiliar,† â€Å"grotesque,† and â€Å"raw† (8.0). This imagery culminates in figurative and literal cremation, as Wilson is described as â€Å"ashen† (8.0) and his murder-suicide as a â€Å"holocaust† (8.3). By the way, remember that when Fitzgerald uses the word â€Å"holocaust,† he isn’t talking about what happened in Nazi Germany - he is writing about 20 years before WWII. Instead, the word â€Å"holocaust† here means a sacrificial offering that is burned on an altar - unrooted to any specific religion, Wilson’s actions evoke an atavistic, pagan ritual sacrifice. Something is very rotten in the state of Denmark†¦ uh, Long Island. That rotten thing? The rich. Crucial Character Beats Nickhas a premonition that he wants to warn Gatsby about. Gatsby still holds out hope for Daisy and refuses to get out of town as Nick advises. Nick and Jordan break up - he is grossed out by her self-involvement and total lack of concern about the fact that Myrtle died the day before. Wilson goes somewhat crazy after Myrtle’s death, and slowly becomes convinced that the driver of the yellow car that killed her was also her lover, and that he killed her on purpose. He sets out to hunt the owner of the yellow car down. Wilson shoots Gatsby while Gatsby is waiting for Daisy’s phone call in his pool. Then Wilson shoots himself. What’s Next? Think about the novel’s connection to the motif of the seasonsby comparing the ways summer, fall, and winter are described and experienced by different characters. Get a handle on Gatsby’s revelations about his past by seeing all the events put into chronological order. Move on to the summary of Chapter 9, or revisit the summary of Chapter 7. Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points?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: