The Chosen and the Beautiful

“The wind came into the house from the Sound, and it blew Daisy and me around her East Egg mansion like puffs of dandelion seeds, like foam, like a pair of young women in white dresses who had no cares to weigh them down.”

This opening sentence of the novel conveys the ethereal image of Daisy and Jordan floating about without a care in the world. Nghi Vo uses the weightless imagery of dandelion seeds and foam to show how their fun, frivolous existence defies gravity. At this stage in the novel, Daisy and Jordan are set up as identical and interchangeable; something that will soon become disrupted.

“Daisy uttered a surprised cry while I bit down my tongue. We watched as the lion fluttered to the ground, landing with more weight than paper should have had. It hesitated for a moment as if confounded by life in paper as we were, and then it gathered its four paws underneath it, turning several times.”

This passage conveys the magical phenomenon of papercutting and how Jordan has the power to bring inanimate fragments to life. This is evident in the notion of the lion landing with more weight than paper should have and its anthropomorphized feeling of hesitation before making animal movements. Daisy’s cry conveys astonishment, while Jordan’s biting of her tongue is symbolic of her repression of certain aspects of her identity.

“They had the same pale eyes, the same generous and mobile mouth, the same way of carrying their weight as if it were nothing at all, and yet you would never think they were related, let alone the same man.”

Here Vo conveys through Jordan’s eyes how Gatsby has changed from the humble young lieutenant that Daisy fell in love with. In the comparison she describes Gatsby’s particular physicality to make him a concrete figure for the reader, as she details the particulars of a mobile mouth and a weightless carriage—both these are elements that evoke lightness and transformation. Still, despite always showing the capacity for change in his features, Gatsby has now altered beyond recognition.