Editor's Choice
In The Great Gatsby, why does Jordan tell Nick, "Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I?"
Quick answer:
In The Great Gatsby, when Jordan tells Nick that she met another bad driver, she means that Nick isn't the honest, straightforward person she thought he was. In other words, Nick is just like her, and that's not what Jordan wants.
Jordan and Nick have a cryptic and complicated relationship, and our perception of it is colored by Nick's unreliable narration. He projects his own worst traits onto Jordan while trying to absolve himself of guilt so he can feel pure, like the snows of the midwest. We have to take everything he says about Jordan with a grain of salt.
For more than fifty years, critics have noted that there are hints that Nick is gay, such as the hazy interlude after Myrtle's party when he ends up in a hotel room with Mr. McKee and in the way he seems to have fallen under Gatsby's spell. Since at least the 1940s, critics have noted Jordan's androgyny, which would have been more pronounced to audiences when the book first came out.
Nick projects his own dishonesty onto Jordan just at the moment that he is feeling very uncomfortable about...
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his continual lying to the girlfriend in Chicago thatTom and Daisy thought he was engaged to. When Jordan tells him she's met another bad driver in him at the end of the book, she means him. He is once again projecting his failings and self-disgust onto her. She is resisting his efforts to do so. She is holding up a mirror to him and saying that he is just as bad as she is.
The context is Myrtle's death. Nick won't come into Tom's house after the accident, though both Tom and Jordan urge him to do so. Nevertheless, Nick is disgusted when he finds out that Jordan left the house, too, though apparently not until the next morning:
"I've left Daisy's house," she said. "I'm at Hempstead and I'm going down to Southampton this afternoon."
Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy's house, but the act annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid.
It is hypocritical for Nick to be angry at Jordan for doing what he did in leaving the Buchanans. It then leaves him "rigid" that she tells the truth that he wasn't nice to her the night before: he didn't support her, but bailed.
When she says he was a bad driver, she indicates that he is dishonest and that he has mishandled and carelessly crashed their relationship. She says:
I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.
Jordan is saying that she has discovered that he is dishonest. He's never really cared about her, and she realizes that now.
They say that opposites attract, and that certainly seems to be the case when it comes to Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway. Jordan is devious, reckless, and dishonest, both on the golf course and off it. Nick, on the other hand, couldn't be more different, which is why Jordan is drawn to him.
The true face of Jordan is revealed in a conversation with Nick, during which she demonstrates her lack of care and attention when it comes to driving. She expects other people to be careful, effectively making allowances for her carelessness. It takes two to make an accident, she says, and if other road users are careful, then everything will work out just fine.
She applies the same principle to her relationship with Nick. So long as Nick is the careful one, then all will be well. But if he starts getting careless and acting dishonestly, in other words, if he starts behaving like Jordan, then there's no future to the relationship.
Jordan had always believed Nick to be an honest, straightforward kind of guy, the ideal complement to her very different set of characteristics. But in actual fact, it turns out that he, like her, was a “bad driver” all along, someone every bit as careless as herself. Now that she's met another “bad driver,” Jordan no longer feels that she's safe.
When toward the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jordan Baker says to Nick, “Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I,” she is referring not to driving but to the poor choice she made in being drawn to Nick. In the novel’s final chapter, Nick is reflecting on his days in New York and his relationships to Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Jay Gatsby. His relationship with Jordan has ended on a sour note, as Nick breaks up with her over the telephone. He approaches Jordan one day before he departs New York and engages her in conversation. It is during this conversation that Jordan references an earlier discussion the two had (in chapter 3) when Jordan barely avoids hitting some workmen while driving erratically. In the following exchange from that earlier chapter, Jordan provides a clue to the comments she will make in the novel’s closing passages:
"You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”
“I am careful.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”
“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”
“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”
So, in chapter 9, when Jordan remarks that she met another bad driver, she is referencing what she considers her misjudgment with respect to Nick:
“Oh, and do you remember," she added, ”a conversation we had once about driving a car?”
“Why—not exactly.”
“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person.”
Jordan had suggested earlier in the novel that it takes two careless people to make a catastrophe and that Nick was not careless. She now thinks otherwise of the once-innocent boy from the Midwest who has dumped this beautiful, wealthy woman.