What do these paragraphs mean in The Great Gatsby?
Can someone please explain these two paragraphs from The Great Gatsby :)
The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wings.
I'm a little confused about the statement "he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty." What business and service? And what is this "Platonic conception?" I read that platonic means to love? Help!!
And Is the second paragraph describing his desire for wealth or his desire for Daisy?
Thanks for your help
Answers & Comments
Verified answer
Plato thought that what was on earth was an imperfect copy of ideal forms that existed in a world we might be able to imagine, however dimly, but not see. Jay Gatsby thought of what he wanted to be--his ideal--and then set about making that ideal actual, thus "springing from his Platonic conception of himself." He was not shaped by outside forces; he was not the product of his parents: he was the product of what he himself conceived.
The part about being about his father's business is a parody of the Bible (see Luke II, 41-49), where Jesus explains to his parents that he is doing his Father's business by answering religious questions put to him in the temple. Only Gatsby the man is not religious, nor is the book religious. He instead decides to make himself rich (= business) by supplying the wants of the public, which are limitless, crass, and a prostituting of finer things—"vast, vulgar, meretricious."
This is the young Gatsby, perhaps the same age as Jesus when Jesus was in the temple. He doesn't know yet what he wants but he is ambitious; he is just a kid. He wants something grand and gaudy, to make that real, to make the marvelous happen in his life, to bring to actuality his romantic fantasies, as well as to assure himself that his incompletely understood and thought through dreams are the driving force behind the great achievement of the world at large.
It isn't a case yet of Daisy or wealth or anything specific because he doesn't know enough of the world to comprehend what these women or money, luxury or love, are and what they can do or how the world itself operates. He knows only that he wants something larger, to realize his aspirations in some concrete way. What that way is and how that accomplishment is to be achieved he does not know yet.
The Blackbusks are rich and powerful and gathered in the nook of the room and scorned all others who they proposal have been valueless, inferior, low-expense and not necessary of their social category or prominence. The "goats" phrase used is a put down like rats or dogs.