Death of Myrtle Wilson

Myrtle Wilson's death is the violent pivot on which the novel's final tragedy turns, transforming a secret affair and a reckless afternoon into an irrevocable catastrophe that destroys two lives and exposes the moral emptiness of those who survive. The accident occurs on a sweltering evening in late summer, just after the confrontation at the Plaza Hotel has shattered Gatsby's dream of reclaiming Daisy. As Gatsby and Daisy drive back toward Long Island in Gatsby's yellow car, Daisy, at the wheel and frantic with nerves, loses control when Myrtle Wilson rushes into the road. The car strikes Myrtle with fatal force, killing her instantly and leaving her body broken on the asphalt of the Valley of Ashes.

The Accident and Its Immediate Aftermath

The young Greek Michaelis, who runs the coffee shop beside the ashheaps, is the principal witness. He has spent the afternoon trying to comfort George Wilson, who is sick and agitated after discovering that his wife has a secret life apart from him. Wilson has locked Myrtle in her room above the garage, vowing to take her away. Just after seven o'clock, Myrtle's voice is heard scolding and shouting downstairs; she cries out, "Beat me! Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!" Moments later she rushes out into the dusk, waving her hands. Before Michaelis can move from his door, the business is over. The "death car," as the newspapers will call it, does not stop. It emerges from the gathering darkness, wavers tragically for a moment, and disappears around the next bend. The other car, heading toward New York, stops a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurries back to find Myrtle Wilson kneeling in the road, her life violently extinguished, her thick dark blood mingling with the dust. When Michaelis and the other man tear open her shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, they see that her left breast is swinging loose like a flap; there is no need to listen for the heart beneath. Her mouth is wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she has choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

The Discovery and Tom Buchanan's Response

Nick Carraway, Jordan Baker, and Tom Buchanan, returning from New York in Tom's blue coupe, come upon the crowd gathered outside Wilson's garage. Tom, initially assuming a minor wreck, slows down and gets out. Peering over a circle of heads, he sees Myrtle's body wrapped in blankets on a work-table, and makes a harsh sound in his throat. With a violent thrust of his powerful arms, he pushes his way through. George Wilson stands on the threshold of his office, swaying back and forth, holding to the doorposts, and giving out an incessant, high, horrible call: "Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!" Tom, his face wet with tears, whispers to Nick, "Let's get out." As they drive away, Tom sobs and whimpers, "The God damned coward! He didn't even stop his car." Later that night, Gatsby tells Nick the truth: Daisy was driving. She was very nervous after the confrontation in New York, and thought driving would steady her. When Myrtle rushed out at them, Daisy first turned away from the woman toward the other car, then lost her nerve and turned back. Gatsby's hand reached the wheel just as he felt the shock. "It must have killed her instantly," he says. "Don't tell me, old sport." He explains that Daisy stepped on the gas, that he tried to make her stop but she couldn't, so he pulled the emergency brake. Then she fell over into his lap and he drove on. Gatsby insists he will say he was driving, and he spends the night watching outside the Buchanan mansion to protect Daisy from any brutality Tom might attempt.

The Chain of Revenge

George Wilson, shattered by grief and convinced that the driver of the yellow car murdered his wife, begins a desperate search. He tells Michaelis that he has a way of finding out whom the yellow car belongs to. He recalls that a couple of months earlier his wife had come from the city with her face bruised and her nose swollen. He has found a small, expensive dog leash, made of leather and braided silver, in a drawer. "Then he killed her," Wilson says. "She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn't stop." By half-past two the next afternoon, Wilson has learned Gatsby's name and made his way to West Egg. Tom Buchanan later admits to Nick that he told Wilson who owned the car. "He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave," Tom says, "and when I sent down word that we weren't in he tried to force his way up-stairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn't told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was in the house." Tom insists that Gatsby "had it coming to him" and that he "ran over Myrtle like you'd run over a dog and never even stopped his car." Nick, knowing the truth that Daisy was driving, finds himself unable to speak it. The accident thus sets in motion a chain of misdirection and revenge that ends with George Wilson shooting Gatsby dead in his swimming pool and then turning the gun on himself.

Thematic Significance

Myrtle Wilson's death is the novel's most brutal demonstration of the carelessness of the wealthy. She is a woman of immense vitality, trapped in a loveless marriage and a desolate landscape, who reaches for a life of glamour and excitement through her affair with Tom Buchanan. When she runs into the road, she is not merely a victim of a traffic accident; she is the collateral damage of a world in which the rich "smash up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness." Daisy, the golden girl whose voice is full of money, drives the car that kills her and never faces any consequence. Tom, who has used Myrtle and then discarded her, directs her husband's vengeance toward an innocent man. The yellow car, a symbol of Gatsby's wealth and his dream, becomes the instrument of destruction. And the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, the giant advertisement that broods over the Valley of Ashes, bear silent witness to the tragedy, a godless deity watching over a world where justice is a matter of class and the poor are ground under the wheels of the rich.