Myrtle says she will say Daisy's name any time she wants, so Tom slaps her across the face and breaks her nose.
Myrtle angrily says that she will talk about whatever she chooses and begins chanting Daisy's name. Tom responds by breaking her nose, bringing the party to an abrupt halt.
Tom hits Myrtle because she refused to obey him, but also in defense of Daisy; he feels strongly about both women. Tom's outburst therefore shows that he has difficulty handling complex emotions.
Tom's relationship with Myrtle
After Myrtle enrages Tom by repeating Daisy's name, Tom hits her and breaks her nose.
Daisy!... I'll say it whenever I want to!” (p. 41) Tom actually gets so angry that he strikes her and breaks her nose.
She tells Gatsby, “You always look so cool,” and everyone else can see that “[s]he had told him that she loved him.” However, Daisy chooses Tom in the end and even lets him tell George that it was Gatsby who killed Myrtle.
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.
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.
Tom breaks Myrtles nose by back handing her in the face because she keeps chanting Daisy's name. It shows that men are superior to women and men do not treat women well.
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'.
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 party breaks up after Tom punches Myrtle in the face and breaks her nose. He does it because she mentions Daisy's name.
Gatsby was an outsider, so Tom could get away with blaming him instead of Daisy who was an insider. Jen I took it as Nick' s loyalty to Gatsby. Gatsby wouldn't have wanted him to reveal that Daisy was the driver. As well as Gatsby would rather take the fall for his one true love.
McKee did not sleep together or even if Fitzgerald did not mean to imply as much, the fact that Mr. McKee and Nick are together in their underwear is not typical for two heterosexual men in the 1920s.
Tom is having an affair with Myrtle, Myrtle is cheating on her husband with Tom, andDaisy is having an affair with Gatsby.
Tom's strength and bulk give him an air of danger and aggression, as when he hurts Daisy's finger and she calls him a “brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen…” Tom's physical appearance is echoed in his mental inflexibility and single-minded way of thinking about the world.
What does Tom's breaking of Myrtle's nose indicate about his respect for her and for Daisy? It shows his lack of respect for women and belief that women are below men.
Meanwhile, Daisy's husband, Tom Buchanan, is also having an affair with Myrtle Wilson, a poor woman that lives in the Valley of Ashes. Daisy knows about Tom's affair, but Tom does not know about hers until Daisy almost leaves him for Gatsby while they are in the city.
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 “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.
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.
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.
Myrtle Wilson dies due to the car accident. Although everyone thought Gatsby had killed Myrtle, as she was hit by his yellow car, Daisy was driving the car that night. Gatsby just took the blame for her.
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).
Tom was shocked by this news. 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.