Myrtle says she will say Daisy's name any time she wants, so Tom slaps her across the face and breaks her nose.
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 tells her to stop, and when she doesn't, he hits her.
This small injury foreshadows a far more disturbing incident in the next chapter, where Tom deliberately breaks the nose of his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, when she drunkenly insists on repeating Daisy's name. Here, Daisy upsets Tom by repeating the word 'hulking'.
The party breaks up after Tom punches Myrtle in the face and breaks her nose. He does it because she mentions Daisy's name.
Nick Carraway answers this in Chapter 2 when Myrtle jealously repeats Daisy's name. She desperately wants to live in a place like East Egg outside of New York City. This ambitious dream is her guide as she becomes the mistress of Daisy's husband Tom.
Daisy, who doesn't know Myrtle, is driving the car when it strikes Myrtle down; Daisy doesn't even stop to see what happened, and escapes without consequences. The lower class characters – Gatsby, Myrtle, and George – are thus essentially sacrificed for the moral failings of the upper class characters of Tom and Daisy.
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.
He breaks Myrtle's nose, Daisy complains he has hurt her little finger, and, in the past, he caused a chambermaid he was having an affair with to break her arm after crashing his car, while he himself, typically, was unscathed.
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.
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.
Daisy does not stop the car after hitting Myrtle shows she was panicked at first. 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.
At the garage in the valley of ashes, George and Myrtle Wilson argue and she runs out into the street where she is hit by a 'big yellow car'. The narrative switches back to Nick. Tom realises that it was Gatsby's car that struck and killed Myrtle.
Myrtle Wilson, a woman who is said to have 'tremendous vitality' (p. 131), has had her nose broken by Tom Buchanan, and now she is killed by a car driven by Daisy. Remember that earlier that day Myrtle had seen Tom driving the 'death car' (p. 131); she later ran into the road, desperate to speak with him.
Nick initially refuses to shake Tom's hand but eventually accepts. 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.
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.
Daisy Buchanan is married to Tom Buchanan, and Tom continuously cheats on her with other women. Daisy is aware of what is happening and she has to sit there and listen to Tom tell people about it.
Myrtle says she will say Daisy's name any time she wants, so Tom slaps her across the face and breaks her nose.
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.
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.
Possibly drunk from the day in the city, Daisy carelessly strikes Myrtle with Gatsby's car. She then negligently speeds off from the scene of the accident without stopping. She is only thinking about herself rather than the woman she struck.
Gatsby's funeral is ironic because only three people attend, while enormous crowds attended his parties. Despite being a popular figure in the social scene, once Gatsby passes, neither Daisy, his business partner Henry Wolfsheim, nor any of his partygoers seem to remember him or care.
Tom and Daisy both show corruption through selfishness in similar ways. They both cheat on each other and do not even think to wonder how this will affect the other. They believe they are above others in society because of their money and use it to their advantage.
The most famous murder in American literature is that of the titular hero in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Jay Gatsby is shot to death in the swimming pool of his mansion by George Wilson, a gas-station owner who believes Gatsby to be the hit-and-run driver who killed his wife, Myrtle.
Tom's relationship with Myrtle
After Myrtle enrages Tom by repeating Daisy's name, Tom hits her and breaks her nose. This attack reveals Tom's brutal nature and pinpoints the relationship between Myrtle and Tom as a stressor for the story.
Daisy “taking it pretty well” indicates that she had little remorse after killing Myrtle, especially since the woman was Tom's mistress. Unlike Tom and Nick, Daisy was not as devastated over Myrtle's death.