Great gatsby how old is myrtle

It is revealed that it is Nick on the phone, who stays on the line long enough to hear the two gunshots. The funeral is attended only by reporters and photographers, who Nick angrily chases out. The media accuses Gatsby of being the lover and eventual murderer of Myrtle, leaving Nick as the only one who knows the truth. The Great Gatsby Wiki Explore.

Wiki Content. Recent blog posts Forum. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Myrtle Wilson. Edit source History Talk 0. This situation only amplifies her desperation to escape, which leads to her death in Chapter 7. The lower class characters — Gatsby, Myrtle, and George — are thus essentially sacrificed for the moral failings of the upper class characters of Tom and Daisy. Ace your assignments with our guide to The Great Gatsby!

SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. How does Nick Carraway first meet Jay Gatsby? Why did Daisy marry Tom? Why does Gatsby arrange for Nick to have lunch with Jordan Baker? How does Tom find out about the affair between Gatsby and Daisy? How does Gatsby make his money?

Myrtle desperately wants to come off as sophisticated and wealthy despite her humble roots. Nick finds her efforts tacky and vulgar, and he spends a lot of time commenting on her clothes, mannerisms, and conversational style.

She is oblivious about upper-class life: she tells her sister at one point Tom doesn't divorce Daisy because Daisy is Catholic. That Myrtle thinks accepts Tom's lie shows that she is not a well-schooled as she thinks she is about the life and customs of the elite class she wants to be a part of. Still, before the novel begins, Tom has gotten comfortable showing Myrtle around in popular restaurants and doesn't hide the affair.

Perhaps this causes Myrtle to misunderstand what she means to Tom: she doesn't seem to realize she's just one in a string of mistresses. To see Myrtle's life events alongside those of the other characters, check out our timeline of The Great Gatsby.

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The idea of Myrtle Wilson is introduced in Chapter 1 , when she calls the Buchanans' house to speak to Tom. We get our first look at Myrtle in Chapter 2 , when Nick goes with Tom to George Wilson's garage to meet her, and then to Myrtle's apartment in Manhattan for a party. On that day, she buys a dog, has sex with Tom with Nick in the next room , throws a party, and is fawned on by her friends, and then ends up with a broken nose when Tom punches her after she brings up Daisy.

This doesn't prevent her from continuing the affair. Later on, in Chapter 7 , George starts to suspect she's having an affair when he finds her dog's leash in a drawer at the house. He locks her upstairs in their house, determined to move out west once he gets the money from the car sale he's waiting on from Tom. Myrtle glimpses Tom, along with Nick and Jordan, as they drive up to Manhattan in Gatsby's yellow car.

Myrtle and George fight later that evening, and Myrtle manages to run out of the house after yelling at George to beat her and calling him a coward.

Just then, she spots the yellow car heading back for Long Island. Thinking it's Tom, she runs toward and then out in front of the car, waving her arms. But Daisy is driving the car, and she decides to run over Myrtle rather than get into a head-on collision with an oncoming car. She hits Myrtle, who dies instantly.

Myrtle's death emotionally and mentally devastates George, which prompts him to murder Gatsby who he mistakes for both his wife's killer and lover , and then kill himself. The death car. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room.

With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

Here, we see Myrtle transformed from her more sensuous, physical persona into that of someone desperate to come off as richer than she actually is. Wielding power over her group of friends, she seems to revel in her own image. Unlike Gatsby, who projects an elaborately rich and worldly character, Myrtle's persona is much more simplistic and transparent. Notably Tom, who immediately sees Gatsby as a fake, doesn't seem to mind Myrtle's pretensions—perhaps because they are of no consequence to him, or any kind of a threat to his lifestyle.

Here we see Myrtle pushing her limits with Tom—and realizing that he is both violent and completely unwilling to be honest about his marriage. While both characters are willful, impulsive, and driven by their desires, Tom is violently asserting here that his needs are more important than Myrtle's.

After all, to Tom, Myrtle is just another mistress, and just as disposable as all the rest. Also, this injury foreshadows Myrtle's death at the hands of Daisy, herself.

While invoking Daisy's name here causes Tom to hurt Myrtle, Myrtle's actual encounter with Daisy later in the novel turns out to be deadly. When George confronts his wife about her affair, Myrtle is furious and needles at her husband—already insecure since he's been cheated on—by insinuating he's weak and less of a man than Tom.

Also, their fight centers around her body and its treatment, while Tom and Daisy fought earlier in the same chapter about their feelings. In this moment, we see that despite how dangerous and damaging Myrtle's relationship with Tom is, she seems to be asking George to treat her in the same way that Tom has been doing. Myrtle's disturbing acceptance of her role as a just a body—a piece of meat, basically—foreshadows the gruesome physicality of her death.

Michaelis and this man reached her first but when they had torn open her shirtwaist still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath.

The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long. Even in death, Myrtle's physicality and vitality are emphasized. In fact, the image is pretty overtly sexual—notice how it's Myrtle's breast that's torn open and swinging loose, and her mouth ripped open at the corners.

This echoes Nick's view of Myrtle as a woman and mistress, nothing more—even in death she's objectified. This moment is also much more violent than her earlier broken nose. While that moment cemented Tom as abusive in the eyes of the reader, this one truly shows the damage that Tom and Daisy leave in their wake, and shapes the tragic tone of the rest of the novel. The graphic and bloody nature of Myrtle's death really sticks with you. You will most likely be asked to write about Myrtle in relation to other characters especially Daisy , or in prompts that ask you to compare the "strivers" in the book including also Gatsby, George Wilson with the old money set Tom, Daisy, Jordan.

To learn how best to approach this kind of compare and contrast essay, read our article on common character pairings and how to analyze them.