At the end of Chapter Five, Nick makes much of the power of Daisy’s voice over Gatsby: “I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be overdreamed—that voice was a deathless song” (p.96). Later on, Gatsby observes that “Her voice is full of money,” and Nick develops the point: “That was it, I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.” Is it possible for characters in Gatsby’s world to disentangle different kinds of value: In particular, do the social conventions and self-understandings of the main characters allow them to disentangle the material value associated with economic wealth, the value attributed to a human object of desire, the aesthetic value of a beautiful object, and the moral values by which one assesses a person’s character? Why, if it all, does this matter?
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