demonstrates Gatsbyplaying with time. This again, is a sign of insecurity because he hits the clock out of nervousness. In a quick discussion with Nick, Gatsby reveals how he thinks this is not a good idea. Nick leaves the two alone.

Nick is absent for whatever reconciliation occurs so the reading audience does not see it.

Nick returns when the sun comes out, and their relationship then seems sealed. I would argue that Fitzgerald uses weather, symbols, irony, and character actions to help create mood.

At the beginning of this chapter, Fitzgerald achieves a melancholy mood through sentence structure and employing strategic word choice.

The chapter opens with Nick's inability to sleep, immediately connoting a sense of unease. The sentence then breaks with a semicolon instead of a full stop; the sentence itself is fragmented and unsettled. Fitzgerald then employs personification, noting that the foghorn groaned, a sound of sadness and mourning. Nick is "half-sick" and finds comfort neither in being awake or asleep. The reality he must face from the previous night is "grotesque" and his dreams are "savage" and "frightening." Each of these descriptors connotes a strongly negative mood in these opening sentences. Fitzgerald again breaks up the sentence by employing an em-dash, further fragmenting Nick's thoughts.

As he rushes to Gatsby, Nick notes that Gatsby's vivacious and eternally hopeful character has shifted. He no longer finds him reaching toward Daisy's green light but instead leaning, seemingly unable to even support himself. He is now "heavy with dejection."

Gatsby reveals that he waited outside Daisy's house all night. Nothing happened. She had not come to him. Instead, she came to the window around 4 a.m. and after looking out briefly, surely knowing that Gatsby was waiting for her, she turned out the light and returned to her husband.

The descriptors of Gatsby's house have also shifted. Once a place of liveliness and festivities, the house now stands empty. Nick observes that it is dusty, musty, and stale.

Even Gatsby is losing hope in this moment, and the opening of chapter 8 reflects that. Neither Gatsby nor his house offers a promising sense of eager anticipation any longer. The mood of his house reflects the truth that Gatsby is coming to terms with: Daisy will never be his.

Nick's description of Gatsby in the opening paragraphs is quite unlike the descriptions that painted him as spirited, hopeful, and eager prior to this chapter. Nick walks to Gatsby's house after Gatsby leaves Daisy and Tom's home, and he says that Gatsby "was leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep." The titular character certainly seems low. Gatsby's typically lively house now feels "enormous" with its curtains like "pavilions," its "innumerable feet" of walls, and its "ghostly piano." It sounds lonely and sad, as though it has been forgotten by all the people who once thought it grand. It hardly resembles the carnival atmosphere of the party setting. There is "dust," and the house smells "musty," as though it has sat alone and unused. Though Nick encourages Gatsby to leave town so that the accident involving Myrtle cannot be traced to him, Nick notes that "[Gatsby] was clutching at some last hope and [Nick] couldn't bear to shake him free." Something about this line feels final and ultimate; it probably has something to do with the idea of a "last hope" to which Gatsby clings when all other hope has faded. It is so sad to think of how fully he believed he could relive the past, and now he just cannot let go of the idea, though it seems more and more impossible.

The first paragraph is very troubling: it uses fear, anxiety, sleeplessness, and the "groaning" sound of a fog-horn in the distance.  Nick wants so badly for things to be cleared for Gatsby.  Gatsby is a good guy, especially compared to people like Daisy and Tom.  He has dreams/nightmares and he can barely wait to jump out of bed to go see if he can help Gatsby before he gets into serious danger or trouble.

"I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive, and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress—I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about, and morning would be too late."

Described as the atmosphere of a piece of writing, the mood of a literary work has to do with the emotions a literary piece arouses in a reader.

In the first three chapters of The Great Gatsby, there is a dark mood because of ambiguity, superficiality, greed, and moral decadence. There is also in Fitzgerald's writing evidence of his gift for evocation as he brings to life the Jazz Age, its restlessness, and its insatiable appetite for materialism and pleasure.

The first three chapters reflect this restlessness, "the foul dust" of materialism, and the superficiality and decadence of the twenties. In chapter one during Nick Carraway's visit to "two old friends whom [he] scarcely knew at all," there is a mood of superficiality. This superficiality is conveyed by Nick's comment about his "two old friends" that he does not know, along with his description of the Buchanan's Georgian Colonial mansion. Tom Buchanan stands on the front porch wearing a riding habit, as though he were the owner of a large plantation. "I've got a nice place here," he says, his eyes flashing about restlessly. Later, Nick observes, "He had changed since his New Haven years." Nick then points to Tom's "fractiousness" and "touch of paternal contempt...even toward people he liked."

Inside the mansion, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker exhibit a certain superficiality and jaded quality. Nick observes,

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. 

When Nick looks at Miss Baker's "glowing face" he is "compelled forward breathlessly." However, as he listens to her, the glow soon fades, thus conveying her shallowness:

...deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

In chapter two, the mood of decadence is conveyed by the "grey land and spasms of bleak dust" covering the dumping ground for industrial and material waste. Also, Tom Buchanan takes Nick with him as he picks up his mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Again, Buchanan demonstrates his superficiality and insincerity when he speaks to George Wilson, Myrtle's husband, about buying an automobile from him. At the same time, he is having an affair with the man's wife. Then, too, Myrtle is herself superficial as she acts as though she is among the upper class while with guests at the hotel room in New York City. For instance, she changes into an elaborate dress, and her voice assumes "an impressive hauteur" as she converses with the others.

In chapter three, the mood of decadence continues with yellow imagery which conveys luxury, hedonism, and falsity. Simply so he can showcase his wealth, Gatsby stages parties to which strangers simply arrive. Almost no one is actually invited, suggesting the superficiality of the affair. Also, there is an excessiveness that connotes decadence and immorality:

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Chrismas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden.

Tables of food abound and there are meats and platters of fowl of all kinds. A five piece orchestra arrives, and there are "enthusiastic meetings of women who do not even know each other's names." One of the few invited guests, Nick, hears strange people talking. He observes,

I was sure that they were all selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key. 

Married men flirt with young single women who wander about the premises. Nick overhears one say, "I never care what I do, so I always have a good time." Amid all this shallow talk, there are "vacuous bursts of laughter."

Other guests whisper rumors about their host, Mr. Gatsby. Nick observes,

It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

Lacking Gatsby's romantic vision, Nick sees life in the East Egg as petty, ambiguous, superficial, and amoral. The first three chapters of Fitzgerald's narrative aptly depicts the superficiality of people and their decadent, immoral behavior.

The mood in the first few chapters is somewhat sad.  Nick Carraway, the narrator, is telling the story after all the events have taken place, and he uses foreshadowing to help establish this mood.  He says, in part, "Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."  Such a statement lets us know that someone good comes to harm, that something tragic is going to occur, and that the events will be so disillusioning that they will cause this young man to want to withdraw from the world.  As a result of this foreshadowing of tragedy, the mood could also be described as foreboding.  There is a sense of something coming.  Nick says that he "came back [from the war feeling] restless," and his restlessness affects the mood as we await whatever tragedy we know to be inevitable.