The Grape Gatsby

First, I'd like to present the following tweet of me from the last Friday. 

"He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well−loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs. His bedroom was the simplest room of all except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his eyes and began to laugh. "It's the funniest thing, old sport," he said hilariously. "I can't -When I try to −." He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock. Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing−gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high. "I've got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall." He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many−colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple−green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. "

This passage is one of the most important in the whole book in my opinion. That's what makes it so interesting to me, along with how the passage portrays the characters and its imagery. This passage is about how Gatsby is having his first interaction with Daisy and they are currently in Gatsby's house. Gatsby is dumbfounded after looking at Daisy the whole time they are at the house. He can't take his eyes off of her, not even as he almost falls down a flight of stairs. Gatsby is so "consumed with wonder at her presence" that he isn't able to speak at all only stare at her. This is also the part where Daisy sees all of Gatsby's wealth for the first time. As she is obliviously attracted to it, she starts to realize her lost love for Gatsby, so she starts crying about how the shirts (wealth) are so beautiful. 

Another key line in the passage above was when Nick called Gatsby an "overwound clock." This is relating to not only the clock that Gatsby almost smashed, but the desire that Gatsby has to try and make things like they were in the past. He had been waiting all this time to get to Daisy, but now that he is with her, he turns out to be broken and messed up, like an overwound clock. He cannot go back to the way things were, like in his past, and this is what ends up eventually destroying him. Now that Daisy has moved on with Tom, Gatsby starts to feel that he is left out and this amplifies his feelings for Daisy. Ultimately, this passage is a shift in the book, as the characters are shown under a new light for the first time, and that is the reason why this is one of my favorite passages.