Nick Carraway confronts Tom Buchanan about Wilson's visit

One afternoon late in October, walking along Fifth Avenue in New York, Nick Carraway saw Tom Buchanan ahead of him, moving in his alert, aggressive way, his hands held out a little from his body as if to fight off interference, his head shifting sharply to match his restless eyes. Nick slowed to avoid overtaking him, but Tom stopped to frown into a jewelry store window, then turned and walked back, holding out his hand. Nick refused the gesture, saying, "You know what I think of you." Tom dismissed the accusation, calling Nick "crazy as hell" and claiming not to know what was wrong with him. This encounter, set months after Gatsby's death, became the stage for Nick's final moral accounting with the man he held responsible for the catastrophe.

The Question of Wilson's Visit

Nick asked directly: "What did you say to Wilson that afternoon?" Tom stared at him without a word, and Nick knew he had guessed correctly about the missing hours between the accident and Gatsby's murder. Tom then admitted the truth: George Wilson had come to his door while the Buchanans were preparing to leave, and when Tom sent word that they were not in, Wilson tried to force his way upstairs. "He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn't told him who owned the car," Tom said. He added that Wilson's hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was in the house. Tom broke off defiantly, insisting that Gatsby "had it coming to him"—that Gatsby had thrown dust into everyone's eyes and was a tough character who ran over Myrtle Wilson "like you'd run over a dog and never even stopped his car." Nick could say nothing in reply except the one unutterable fact that it was not true: Daisy, not Gatsby, had been driving the yellow car that killed Myrtle.

Tom's Self-Justification and Grief

Tom insisted that he had had his share of suffering. He described going to give up the apartment he kept with Myrtle and seeing the box of dog biscuits still sitting on the sideboard; he sat down and cried like a baby. "By God it was awful," he said. Nick could not forgive him or like him, but he saw that what Tom had done was, to Tom, entirely justified. The confrontation crystallized Nick's final judgment: Tom and Daisy were careless people who smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, leaving others to clean up the mess they had made. Nick shook hands with Tom—it seemed silly not to, for he felt suddenly as though he were talking to a child—and Tom went back into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons.

The Moral Geography of the Confrontation

The encounter on Fifth Avenue, in the heart of the city that had once seemed to promise everything, completed Nick's disillusionment with the East. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had brooded over the Valley of Ashes and which George Wilson had mistaken for the eyes of God, had witnessed the chain of events that led to Gatsby's death. Wilson had told Michaelis that he had taken Myrtle to the window and said, "God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!"—and Michaelis saw that Wilson was looking at the faded billboard. Tom's confession to Nick revealed that he had exploited Wilson's deranged religious fervor, directing the grieving husband toward Gatsby with the same casual cruelty with which he had broken Myrtle's nose months earlier. The confrontation left Nick with the understanding that Tom and Daisy's world was one where the poor and the dreamers paid for the transgressions of the rich, and where the eyes of God, if they existed, looked down on an advertisement rather than a judgment.