Tom cautions Myrtle not to use Daisy's name, but she mocks him by chanting her name. He strikes Myrtle in the face, breaking her nose. Following this incident, the gathering comes to a close and Nick heads back to his place by train.
The party breaks up after Tom punches Myrtle in the face and breaks her nose. He does it because she mentions Daisy's name.
Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke [Myrtle's] nose with his open hand. The event described here occurs in Chapter 2, when Myrtle insists on her right to say Daisy's name aloud in Tom's presence.
Tom hits Myrtle because she will not stop saying ''Daisy. '' In his mind, she is showing him disrespect and challenging his authority, and he refuses to tolerate this kind of behavior from her. This scene reinforces the idea that, beneath his veneer of calm civility, he has a penchant for violence.
As Gatsby's car approaches the garage, Myrtle, who has been arguing with her husband, sees the vehicle and mistakenly believes that Tom Buchanan is driving it. She runs into the road, intending to speak with him but she is hit and killed.
First, Daisy Buchanan is the driver of the mysterious “death car”—she's the one who accidentally runs over and kills Myrtle. This is ironic because while the reader knows that Tom Buchanan had been having an affair with Myrtle, Daisy has no idea that the woman she killed was her husband's mistress.
The narrative switches back to Nick. Tom realises that it was Gatsby's car that struck and killed Myrtle. Back at Daisy and Tom's home, Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was driving the car that killed Myrtle but he will take the blame.
Myrtle sees the affair as romantic and a ticket out of her marriage, while Tom sees it as just another affair, and Myrtle as one of a string of mistresses. The pair has undeniable physical chemistry and attraction to each other, perhaps more than any other pairing in the book.
That poor bruised little finger is like a symbol of Tom and Daisy's marriage: he hurts it unintentionally, and Daisy just cannot stop talking about it. You get the feeling that Fitzgerald kind of wants her to stop whining already.
Tom is involved with Myrtle because he is bored, and their affair offers him an exciting break from his normal life. He likes the idea of having a secret. As a member of the upper class, he is supposed to comport himself with decorum and restraint.
He imposes his will on Nick and insists with a determination... that bordered on violence that Nick meet his mistress Myrtle. His practised brutality is captured in the way he assaults Myrtle: Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.
Since the early days of his marriage to Daisy, Tom has had affairs with other women. Throughout the novel he commits adultery with Myrtle Wilson, a working-class woman married to a garage mechanic.
Tom tells him that he was the one who told Wilson that Gatsby owned the car that killed Myrtle, and describes how greatly he suffered when he had to give up the apartment he kept in the city for his affair.
To Tom, Myrtle is just another possession, and when she tries to assert her own will, he resorts to violence to put her in her place. Tom at once ensures and endangers her upwardly mobile desires.
Summary of Myrtle's Action in the Novel
On that day, she buys a dog, has sex with Tom (with Nick in the next room), throws a party, and is fawned on by her friends, and then ends up with a broken nose when Tom punches her after she brings up Daisy. This doesn't prevent her from continuing the affair.
In Chapter 9, the mystery of how George found Gatsby is solved. Tom confesses that George first came to Tom's house that night. There, Tom told him that the yellow car was Gatsby's and insinuated that Gatsby was the one who killed Myrtle and the one who was sleeping with her (9.143).
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1. Tom Buchanan, his wife Daisy and Nick. This exchange depicts the unhappy and tense marriage that Daisy has with Tom, who seems worried that she has been airing their dirty laundry. Tom is verbally and emotionally abusive to Daisy.
Daisy, in fact, is more victim than victimizer: she is victim first of Tom Buchanan's "cruel" power, but then of Gatsby's increasingly depersonalized vision of her. She be- comes the unwitting "grail" (p. 149) in Gatsby's adolescent quest to re- main ever-faithful to his seventeen-year-old conception of self (p.
The relationship between Tom and Daisy is built more on money rather than love, however, there is little bits of love. Daisy marries Tom because of his wealth, but throughout their relationship she does, fall in love with Tom at least once.
Although Daisy may have loved Gatsby once, she does not love him more than the wealth, status, and freedom that she has with Tom.
To Gatsby, the innocent and naive Daisy comes to embody the American dream, in other words wealth and social status, a goal he will have reached by winning her hand.
Myrtle believes that the only reason Tom will not divorce Daisy is because Daisy is Catholic. But we learn that Tom's feelings for Myrtle are far less intense than he has led her to believe and that social pressure prevents him from ever leaving Daisy, who comes from a similar upper-class background.
Although George Wilson pulls the trigger to shoot Jay Gatsby, the victim's death is not solely George Wilson's fault. Gatsby's death is a chain reaction involving different parties. However, Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, George Wilson, and Daisy Buchanan are the key characters responsible for Gatsby's death's causal nexus.
After escaping the crime scene, Daisy did not feel anything about killing Myrtle, known by what Gatsby tells Nick. “'I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. It's better that the shock should all come at once. She stood it pretty well.
Daisy doesn 't leave Tom for Gatsby because she has a daughter with Tom. Also, Gatsby may not be who he was before. Since Daisy killed Myrtle, if she leaves Tom she would be in trouble.