Close Reading Post #2

Pg 187 (Tom Buchanan is speaking) "I told him the truth," he said. "He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave and when I sent down word that we weren't in he tried to force his way upstairs. 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---" He broke off defiantly. "What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy's but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you'd run over a dog and never even stopped his car." There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn't true.
"And if you think I didnt have my share of suffering- look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful-"

This passage reveals a lot about the significance of the dog in the story. Dogs can hear well, smell well (noses are between eyes..), and all their senses but one (in general) are sharp; eyesight. They can't see very well, or at least that was the common belief in 1920s. Myrtle, in a way, was the dog. The dog was "washrag brown" with "feet [that] were startlingly white."(32) Myrtle desired more than anything to have some white, richness. But she was mostly unwanted, a usable thing, like a brown washrag. She treated Tom like he was her master, like a dog, even after he broke her nose. And dogs, huntingwise, are useless without their nose. Back to the passage, Myrtle was not only treated like a dog, (her pup was only ten dollars, and Tom said that the seller could go buy "ten more dogs") Tom said she was run over "like you'd run over a dog." And then when Tom was clearing out her flat, he saw the dog biscuits and supposedly "cried like a baby." Although he implies that this is because it had to do with Myrtle dying, why wasnt it any of the expensive things in her flat? After being killed like a dog, why was it a dog-related item that made him cry? Addtionally, Wilson had found the "small expensive dog leash made of leather and braided silver,"(166) which informed him that there was someone else. Not only is a leash a symbol of submitting to ones power by being tethered to them, an expensive tether was what Wilson saw that convinced him of someone else. All of this adds up to how Tom, and she herself, saw Myrtle; as someone who would follow around their master, and might get given nice things in return.

Sidenote; I noticed that the dog's vision was clouded in the smokey room at the beginning, and that Gatsby "threw dust" in everyone's eyes. Maybe it ws showing that Tom "threw dust" in Myrtles eyes?