The car crash sequence in The Great Gatsby is the moment the novel stops threatening violence and delivers it. For six and a half chapters Fitzgerald has been stacking pressure, the affairs, the heat, the rivalry between old money and new, and in the back half of Chapter 7 all of it collapses into a single stretch of road outside Wilson’s garage. Myrtle Wilson runs into the path of a yellow car, the car does not stop, and within a day two more people are dead because of it. Read carelessly, the scene looks like bad luck, a woman in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Read closely, it is something colder and more deliberate: a chain of choices, each one careless, each one made by someone who could have chosen otherwise, locking together until the outcome is no longer avoidable.
This article tracks that chain link by link. It separates what actually happens from what the characters and the newspapers say happened, because the gap between those two accounts is where the chapter does its real work. The single most repeated error about this scene, that Gatsby was at the wheel, is not a careless reader’s mistake so much as the exact false impression the novel engineers and then leaves standing. Following the sequence precisely, who drove which car, who switched with whom, who saw the impact, and who decided afterward what the world would be told, is the only way to see how Fitzgerald turns a road accident into a verdict on a class of people. The death itself, the brutal second when Myrtle is struck, is treated in depth in the close reading of Myrtle’s death scene in Chapter 7; this article holds the wider frame, the whole motion from the car switch through the cover-up.
Where the Car Crash Sequence Sits in Chapter 7
Chapter 7 is the longest chapter in the novel and the hottest, and the crash is its second catastrophe, arriving after the first one has already burned the cast down to raw nerves. The chapter has two movements. The first is the confrontation in the suite at the Plaza Hotel, where Tom Buchanan strips away Gatsby’s invented history in front of Daisy and forces her to admit she cannot say she never loved her husband. That scene breaks Gatsby’s dream in real time. The second movement is the drive home, and it is on that drive that the dream’s wreckage acquires a body count. The two halves are bound together: the crash is not a separate disaster that happens to follow the argument, it is the argument’s physical aftermath. Everyone in those cars is leaving a fight they lost or won, and they are driving on roads they have stopped paying attention to because they are still inside the room they just left.
The structural logic matters because it tells you how to read the speed of events. Fitzgerald does not slow down for the crash. He has spent pages on the suffocating tension of the hotel suite, the warm whiskey, the wedding music drifting up from a ballroom below, and then he releases all of that compression into a fast, fragmented sequence on the road. The pacing is the point. The deliberation that should attend a moment of life and death is exactly what the careless world cannot supply. By the time the reader understands what has occurred, the car is already gone around the bend. The deliberation that should attend a moment of life and death is exactly what the careless world cannot supply, and the essential placement is simple: the crash is the chapter’s payoff, the moment its accumulated heat finally costs a life.
It also matters that the valley of ashes is the setting. The accident happens in the gray industrial corridor between the eggs and the city, beneath the faded billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, in front of the garage where George Wilson sells gas and where his wife has been kept upstairs against her will. This is not a neutral piece of road. The novel has already marked the valley as the place where the consequences of the rich are dumped, the ash heap their pleasures generate. When the death car comes through, it is passing back through the exact territory it has spent the summer ignoring, and the territory takes its toll.
What Happens in the Car Crash Sequence
What happens in the car crash sequence in The Great Gatsby?
On the drive back from the Plaza, Daisy is driving Gatsby’s yellow car when Myrtle Wilson runs into the road and is struck and killed. The car does not stop. Tom, Nick, and Jordan arrive later in Tom’s car to find Myrtle dead, and the cover-up over who was driving begins that same night.
That is the sequence in its barest outline, and even that outline contains the three facts most often scrambled in retellings: the car is Gatsby’s, the driver is Daisy, and the car keeps going. Hold those three steady and the rest of the scene organizes itself around them. Lose any one of them and the meaning of the crash inverts, because the whole moral weight of the episode rests on the distance between who caused the death and who is eventually punished for it.
To read the sequence as analysis rather than recap, it is worth naming the chain of events as a series of decisions rather than accidents. First comes the decision to go into the city at all, made in the overheated parlor at the Buchanans’ when nobody can stand the afternoon any longer. Then comes Tom’s decision to switch cars, taking Gatsby’s conspicuous yellow vehicle for himself and sending Gatsby and Daisy into the city in Tom’s blue coupé. Then, after the Plaza, comes the decision to switch back, so that Gatsby and Daisy return in the yellow car with Daisy at the wheel. Then comes the instant of the impact, when Myrtle, having broken free of the room her husband locked her in, rushes toward the yellow car she believes is carrying the man she has tied her hopes to. Then comes the failure to stop. And finally comes the long aftermath, the accounts assembled at the garage, the version Gatsby gives Nick, and the version Tom later gives Wilson, in which the responsibility for the death is quietly moved off the person who caused it.
Each of those steps is a hinge. Remove the car switch and Myrtle has no reason to run at this particular vehicle. Remove the failure to stop and the death becomes a tragedy that at least acknowledges itself. Remove the cover-up and the law, rather than a grief-maddened husband, decides what happens next. Fitzgerald builds the sequence so that no single step is monstrous on its own. The car switch is a petty dominance move. The fast driving is ordinary recklessness. The not stopping is panic. The cover-up is love and fear. It is only the chain that is lethal, and that is the novel’s argument in miniature.
The Car Switch That Sets the Crash in Motion
Whose car was it and who was driving in the crash?
The car is Gatsby’s, a bright yellow vehicle everyone in the valley of ashes recognizes as his. On the drive back from the Plaza, Daisy is at the wheel, with Gatsby beside her as a passenger. So the vehicle belongs to Gatsby, but the hands driving at the moment of impact are Daisy’s.
The switch is easy to skim past, yet it is the engineering that makes the crash possible. When the group decides to drive into the city to escape the heat, Tom proposes that he take Gatsby’s car and that Gatsby and Daisy take his. On the surface it is a small thing, a man wanting to drive the flashy automobile his rival owns. Underneath, it is a move in the contest the two men have been waging all afternoon. Tom claps Gatsby on the back, calls the yellow car a circus wagon, and installs himself behind its wheel with Nick and Jordan, leaving Gatsby and Daisy alone together in Tom’s vehicle. He is performing ownership, taking the rival’s prize property and putting the rival in his place, both literally and figuratively. The car becomes a token passed between the men, and Daisy, fatally, ends up driving the token.
The first leg of the trip writes the trap. Driving the yellow car into the city, Tom stops for gas at Wilson’s garage, where George tells him he has finally decided to take Myrtle west, sensing without knowing the details that his wife has been carrying on an affair. While Tom fuels the car he himself does not own, Myrtle watches from the window above, and she misreads the scene completely. She sees Tom in the yellow car and assumes it is his, and she sees Jordan beside him and assumes, with a jealous lurch, that the elegant woman is Tom’s wife. Both assumptions are wrong, and both will kill her. The yellow car is now fixed in Myrtle’s mind as Tom’s car. So when, hours later, the same yellow car comes back down the road, she has every reason to believe the man she loves is inside it, and every reason to run toward it.
The drive into the city is its own charged piece of the chapter, the car switch and the stop at the garage arranging the pieces for the catastrophe like a hand dealing cards face down. The journey deserves close attention as a unit, which is why the trip out is read on its own in the analysis of the drive into Manhattan; here the relevant fact is the residue it leaves, a dying marriage in the garage and a misidentified car burned into Myrtle’s mind. By the time the cast leaves the Plaza, the conditions for the crash are fully set, and not one of the people who set them is thinking about Myrtle Wilson at all.
When they switch back for the return, Daisy takes the wheel of the yellow car. Gatsby later explains the reason to Nick: Daisy was overwrought after the scene at the Plaza, and she thought that driving would steady her nerves. It is a small, human, completely ordinary decision, an upset woman wanting the focus that comes from gripping a wheel. It is also the decision that puts the least composed person in the group in control of two thousand pounds of metal on a road she is not watching. The novel does not editorialize. It simply lets the reader hold the fact that the woman driving the death car is driving it precisely because she is too distraught to be driving anything.
The Impact: Reading the Death Car Passage
Fitzgerald withholds the crash from the reader at first. Nick does not see it happen. He is in Tom’s car, behind, and the first sign that anything is wrong is the crowd, the cars stopped on the road, the unnatural cluster of people outside Wilson’s garage. The novel narrates the disaster the way the survivors experience it, as an aftermath they drive up on, not as an event they witness. This is a deliberate choice. By the time the reader arrives at the scene, the woman is already dead and the car is already gone, and the horror is filtered through the confused, secondhand reports of a gathered crowd.
The reconstruction comes from Michaelis, the young Greek who runs the coffee shop next to the garage and who is the closest thing the scene has to a reliable witness. He had been talking with Myrtle earlier, had seen the marks of her husband’s grip on her, and he saw her break out of the house and rush into the road. His account supplies the mechanics the reader needs: Myrtle ran out waving her arms at the oncoming yellow car, the car swerved, seemed about to avoid her, then struck her with full force and accelerated away into the dark. The detail that the car appeared to hesitate, to waver as if the driver almost corrected, is what makes the failure to stop so damning. There was a fraction of a second in which a different choice was physically available, and it was not taken.
The phrase Fitzgerald gives the vehicle is the one that has stuck to it ever since. The newspapers, Nick tells us, called it the “death car,” and the name carries the whole tone of the passage, sensational, impersonal, already converting a human catastrophe into a headline. The death car did not stop. It came out of the gathering darkness, hesitated, and disappeared around the next bend. Reading those clauses closely, you can feel Fitzgerald refusing the comfort of agency. The grammar makes the car the subject. It is the car that comes, the car that wavers, the car that vanishes, as though no person were inside making the choices, as though the machine itself committed the act and fled. That grammatical erasure of the driver is the prose performing the cover-up before any character has spoken a word. The yellow car as an object carries a weight that runs well beyond this scene, a meaning examined in full in the reading of the yellow car as a symbol, but in the crash passage its most important quality is simply this anonymity, the way it lets the death belong to nobody.
The body itself Fitzgerald does not spare. Myrtle, the most physically vivid character in the book, the woman whose vitality has been insisted upon at every appearance, is reduced in an instant to a torn figure in the road, her great reserves of life left as a stain on the highway. The contrast is brutal and intended. The novel has spent its energy on Myrtle’s appetite, her loud laugh, her thick figure, her hunger for a bigger life, and it spends exactly one sentence destroying all of it. The carelessness of the prose, its refusal to dwell, matches the carelessness of the act. There is no slow, dignified death here, only a sudden, mechanical end administered by people who will be at a different party within the week.
The Cover-Up and the Redistribution of Blame
How is the car crash covered up?
The cover-up begins the same night, when Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was driving but that he intends to take responsibility himself. Because he conceals Daisy’s role, and because Tom later tells Wilson the yellow car was Gatsby’s, the blame for the death is moved entirely onto Gatsby, who did not cause it.
The cover-up is not one act but two, performed by two different men for opposite reasons, and together they produce a single result: the person who killed Myrtle Wilson is the only person in the chapter who is never even suspected. Gatsby’s half of the cover-up is an act of devotion. Standing in the dark outside the Buchanan house later that night, keeping a useless vigil over a woman who has already gone back inside to her husband, Gatsby tells Nick plainly that Daisy was driving. When Nick asks the direct question, whether Daisy was at the wheel, Gatsby confirms it and then adds that of course he will say it was him. The line is quiet and absolute. He has already decided. He will absorb the consequence of an act he did not commit because the alternative is exposing the woman he has reorganized his entire life around. It is the purest expression of his devotion and the clearest sign of how completely that devotion has unmoored his judgment.
Tom’s half of the cover-up is the opposite, an act of self-preservation dressed as cooperation. When George Wilson, deranged with grief and convinced that the owner of the yellow car must be both the driver and his wife’s lover, comes to Tom for the name, Tom gives it. He tells Wilson the car belongs to Gatsby. He does this knowing it will point a broken, armed man directly at the house across the bay, and he does it because it solves several of his own problems at once: it removes his wife from suspicion, it eliminates his rival, and it lets him believe, or pretend to believe, that Gatsby was guilty of everything. Tom never learns or never admits that Daisy was driving. He simply assumes Gatsby’s guilt because Gatsby’s guilt is convenient, and he acts on the assumption with lethal efficiency.
The two halves interlock to redistribute the blame with a precision the careless world rarely manages. Daisy, who drove the car and did not stop, retreats into her marriage and her money and is never touched by the law, by Wilson, or by the narrative’s overt judgment. Gatsby, who was a passenger, dies in his pool for it. The redistribution is the chapter’s harshest revelation, because it is not random. It follows the contours of power exactly. The wealthy married couple, secure in their old money, close ranks and let the outsider take the weight. The mechanism by which they do this is not a conspiracy whispered in corners; it is two separate decisions, one loving and one cynical, that happen to point in the same direction. This is the precise moral the novel will name in its final pages, the verdict that Tom and Daisy were careless people who smashed things and let others clean up the mess, and the full weight of that verdict is examined in the analysis of carelessness as the novel’s moral center.
The Accident That Was Waiting to Happen
Here is the namable claim this article defends, the lens it offers a reader for the entire sequence: the crash is the accident that was waiting to happen, an outcome assembled from a chain of careless choices rather than delivered by chance. Bad luck would mean the death was unforeseeable, a freak intersection of innocent actions. The text refuses that reading. Every link in the chain is a decision made carelessly by someone with the power to choose otherwise, and the death is simply where the careless decisions arrive. The novel’s word for the Buchanans, careless, is not loose moral disapproval. It is a precise description of a method of living, the habit of taking actions without tracking their consequences, and the crash is that method made fatal.
Laying the sequence out as a chain makes the argument visible and gives the reader a findable map of who knew what at each step. The table below is the crash-responsibility chain, the spine of the analysis: each row is a step, the actor who made it, the choice it embodied, and the knowledge that actor was operating with at the time. Read down the final column and the cover-up stops looking like a single dramatic betrayal and starts looking like what it is, the natural endpoint of a series of people each managing only their own small piece of the truth.
| Step | Actor | The careless choice | Who knew what at this point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decide to drive to the city | The whole group | Leaving a tense house to chase relief in the heat | Nobody is thinking about Myrtle; the trip is about escaping the afternoon |
| Switch cars on the way in | Tom | Taking Gatsby’s yellow car as a dominance move | Tom flaunts the rival’s car; Gatsby and Daisy ride in Tom’s coupé |
| Stop at Wilson’s garage | Tom | Refueling, indifferent to the watching Myrtle | Myrtle sees the yellow car, wrongly fixes it as Tom’s, wrongly reads Jordan as Tom’s wife |
| Switch cars back after the Plaza | Gatsby and Daisy | Letting the most distraught person drive | Daisy takes the wheel to steady her nerves; Gatsby is the passenger |
| The impact | Daisy | Failing to stop after striking Myrtle | Daisy and Gatsby know a woman was hit; the car keeps going |
| Arrive on the aftermath | Tom, Nick, Jordan | Driving up to find the crowd and the body | Tom believes the yellow car, which is Gatsby’s, was the death car |
| Gatsby’s vigil and confession | Gatsby | Choosing to take the blame to shield Daisy | Nick now knows Daisy drove; Gatsby has decided to say it was him |
| Tom names the car to Wilson | Tom | Pointing a grieving, armed man at Gatsby | Wilson is told the car was Gatsby’s; the blame lands on the one man who did not cause the death |
The chain shows why no single confession would untangle the responsibility. Each actor possesses only a fragment. Michaelis knows what the car looked like but not who drove it. Wilson knows his wife is dead but not who killed her. Tom knows the car was Gatsby’s but assumes the rest. Gatsby knows Daisy drove but conceals it. Daisy knows everything and says nothing. The truth is distributed across the cast so that no one but the reader ever holds all of it, and the people with the most knowledge, Gatsby and Daisy, are the two with the strongest reasons to keep it buried. That distribution of knowledge is not a plot convenience. It is the structural form of carelessness, a world in which nobody is responsible for the whole because everybody is responsible for only their part.
Imagery, Diction, and Narration in the Crash Sequence
The craft of the passage is built to make a reader feel the carelessness rather than merely register it. Three techniques carry most of that work: the deferred, secondhand narration, the diction of machinery and anonymity, and the relentless attachment of the color yellow to wealth gone slightly rotten.
The narration first. Fitzgerald could have put Nick in the death car and given the reader the impact directly. He chose instead to keep Nick behind, in Tom’s vehicle, so that the crash reaches the reader the way scandal reaches a town, through a crowd, through a witness, through the impersonal phrasing of a newspaper. This distance is not a failure of immediacy. It is the immediacy of a particular feeling, the disorientation of arriving after the worst has already happened and trying to reconstruct it from people who half saw it. The reader becomes one more figure in the crowd outside the garage, piecing the event together from fragments, and that position mirrors the moral situation of the whole cast, each person assembling a partial story. Nick’s narration is doing what Nick’s narration always does, presenting itself as careful reportage while quietly shaping what the reader is allowed to know and when.
The diction reinforces the effect. The governing phrase, the death car, drains the moment of human agency. Cars do not commit homicide; drivers do. By letting the newspapers’ label stand and by building the sentences so that the car is the actor, Fitzgerald lets the language enact the evasion the characters will soon perform out loud. The machine becomes the culprit so that no person has to be. This is the same erasure the cover-up will accomplish, prefigured in grammar. The prose teaches the reader, before any character lies, how easy it is to let an object take the blame a person has earned.
Then there is the color. The car is yellow, and yellow in this novel is never neutral. It is the gold that has gone off, the wealth that has curdled, the bright surface with rot underneath. Gatsby’s car, introduced earlier as a thing of rich cream and gleaming nickel, an emblem of his manufactured splendor, becomes in this scene a yellow instrument of death rolling through a gray valley of ash. The color binds the crash to the novel’s whole argument about money, that the brightness of the rich is purchased at a cost dumped somewhere out of sight, in this case on a stretch of road outside a failing garage. The recurrence of cars and driving as a pattern across the book, the reckless guests, the wrecked coupé after Gatsby’s first party, Jordan’s careless driving and her shrug about it, all of it converges here, and the larger pattern is traced in the analysis of the cars and driving motif. The crash is where the motif stops being decorative and becomes deadly, where the novel’s long association of automobiles with heedless privilege finally produces a corpse.
Was Gatsby Driving? Correcting the Most Common Misreading
The single most persistent misreading of this sequence is that Gatsby was driving the car that killed Myrtle. It is worth taking seriously why so many readers come away with that impression, because the answer is not that they read badly. It is that the novel arranges the facts so that the false version is the one most of its own characters believe, and the reader who absorbs the characters’ confusion absorbs the error with it.
The text is unambiguous on the point if you read for it. Gatsby tells Nick directly that Daisy was driving. Nick, our narrator, treats this as the fact of the matter for the rest of the book. There is no later revelation that overturns it, no twist in which Gatsby was lying to protect himself. The confusion does not come from the text being unclear; it comes from the text dramatizing how a clear fact gets buried. Tom believes Gatsby drove. Wilson believes Gatsby drove. The newspapers, working from the visible car, point at the car’s owner. The only people who know otherwise are Gatsby, who has chosen silence, and Daisy, who flees into it. So the version that circulates inside the novel’s world, and the version a casual reader carries out, is the false one, manufactured not by any single lie but by the alignment of everyone’s separate interests around a convenient mistake.
This is where the counter-reading turns into the strongest version of the article’s argument. The fact that Gatsby was not driving is not a trivia correction; it is the heart of the chapter’s indictment. If Gatsby had been at the wheel, the crash would be a tragedy of his own making, his recklessness, his consequence, and Wilson’s revenge would carry a grim symmetry. Because Daisy was driving and Gatsby chose to carry the blame, the crash becomes something far bleaker: a death caused by one person, absorbed by a second out of love, and exploited by a third out of self-interest, with the actual driver protected by the very wealth and marriage she retreats into. The misreading that Gatsby drove is not just an error to correct. It is the precise illusion the Buchanans depend on, and the reader who corrects it sees the cover-up for what it is. To miss it is to let Tom and Daisy’s version win one more time.
The cover-up’s effect on blame is the cruelest part. Daisy commits the act, Gatsby commits to the lie, and Tom commits the lie to paper, so to speak, by handing the name to Wilson. The result is a closed circuit in which the guilty party is shielded by the structures of privilege, the law never gets the truth, and the punishment falls on the man with the least power and the most love. The novel does not present this as an aberration. It presents it as how things work when careless people with money collide with people who have none.
What the Crash Sets Up and Pays Off
The crash is a hinge that pays off the chapters before it and sets up the chapters after it, and reading it well means seeing both directions at once.
Looking back, the sequence pays off the novel’s long preparation of the valley of ashes and the Wilsons. From the first descent into that gray corridor, the valley has been established as the dumping ground for the consequences of the rich, the literal ash heap their industry and pleasure produce, presided over by the blind painted eyes of an old advertisement. Myrtle’s death is the valley collecting what it is owed. It pays off George Wilson’s slow unraveling, his sense that something is wrong with his marriage, his decision to take Myrtle away, his confinement of her in the room she breaks out of. It pays off Myrtle’s own aspiration, her desperate reach toward the glamour Tom represents, by killing her with the very symbol of that glamour, a rich man’s yellow car, as she runs toward what she believes is her lover. The crash is the moment the novel’s social geography turns lethal.
Looking forward, the crash sets the entire ending in motion. Everything that follows flows from this stretch of road. Gatsby’s decision to take the blame keeps him at the Buchanan house, waiting in the dark, and keeps him passive in the days that follow, a man guarding a woman who has already chosen otherwise. Tom’s decision to name the car sends Wilson across the bay. The murder of Gatsby in his pool and Wilson’s suicide afterward are not separate disasters; they are the second and third deaths in a chain that began when Myrtle ran into the road. The sparsely attended funeral, the final disillusionment, Nick’s verdict on the careless rich, all of it is the long tail of this one sequence. The death moment itself, the impact and Myrtle’s end, is read in its own right in the study of Myrtle’s death in Chapter 7, but the structural function of the crash is to be the cause from which the novel’s three deaths descend. Read the sequence as the engine of the ending and the rest of the book clicks into place behind it.
Michaelis and the Reconstructed Crash
The reader’s entire knowledge of the impact passes through one secondhand source, and reading the crash well means reading that source as a source rather than as a window. Michaelis, the young Greek who runs the coffee shop beside Wilson’s garage, is the closest thing the scene has to an honest witness, and Fitzgerald builds the reconstruction of the crash almost entirely from his account. Michaelis had been with George Wilson before the accident, had seen Myrtle confined upstairs, and was on hand when she broke free and ran into the road. He is the one who reports that the car came on, seemed to swerve, then struck her and fled. He is also the one who sits with Wilson through the long night afterward, the only neighbor who does not simply gawk and leave.
What makes Michaelis worth dwelling on is the limit of even an honest witness. He saw the impact, but he did not see who was driving. At the inquest, the testimony about the car becomes a small chaos of detail: a witness describes the car as light green, others insist on yellow, the speed is disputed, the direction argued over. Fitzgerald includes this confusion deliberately. The official record, the thing that is supposed to establish the truth, cannot even fix the color of the car, let alone the identity of the driver. The legal machinery that ought to assign responsibility produces only a muddle, and into that muddle the cover-up slips easily. If the inquest cannot reliably name the color of a car seen by a dozen people in daylight, it has no chance of naming the woman behind a wheel that fled in the dark.
This is a quiet but pointed comment on how the careless rich escape. The novel does not need a corrupt judge or a bought jury to let Daisy walk away. It needs only the ordinary unreliability of witnesses, the ordinary confusion of an accident scene, and the ordinary willingness of two men, Gatsby and Tom, to supply a convenient owner for a car nobody can quite describe. The truth does not so much get suppressed as it gets lost in the noise, and the people with power simply decline to clear the noise up. Michaelis, the one figure who behaves decently throughout, who stays with Wilson and tries to talk him down, is precisely the figure with no power to change anything, and the contrast between his decency and his helplessness is part of the chapter’s bleak arithmetic.
The Question of Intent: Did Daisy Mean to Swerve?
One of the genuine interpretive puzzles in the sequence is the matter of Daisy’s intent, and it is worth taking seriously rather than waving away, because the text leaves a deliberate ambiguity that has fueled real critical disagreement. The reconstruction suggests that the car, faced with another vehicle coming the other way, swerved. Gatsby’s account to Nick describes Daisy first steering toward the oncoming car, perhaps in a startled jerk away from Myrtle, then trying to swerve back, with the result that the car struck Myrtle squarely. On a plain reading, this is panic, a distraught and inexperienced driver making the worst possible correction in a fraction of a second.
A darker reading is available, and the novel does not entirely foreclose it. Myrtle was Tom’s mistress. Daisy had spent the afternoon being told, in the Plaza suite, exactly how thoroughly her husband and her would-be lover had been competing over her. Whether Daisy knew the woman in the road was Myrtle is unclear, and the text never resolves it. The question of whether some part of Daisy registered the figure and did not lift her foot, or even pressed down, hangs over the scene without being answered. Most readings, correctly, treat the crash as an accident of panic rather than a murder of jealousy, because nothing in the text establishes that Daisy recognized Myrtle or acted with intent. But the ambiguity is itself meaningful. Fitzgerald arranges the scene so that the question of intent cannot be settled, and that irresolution is part of the horror. The reader is left unable to fully acquit Daisy and unable to fully convict her, which is exactly the moral fog the careless inhabit.
For an essay, the safe and defensible position is that the crash is an accident in the strict sense, since the text gives no evidence of intent, but that Daisy’s subsequent conduct, the failure to stop, the silence, the retreat behind Gatsby’s sacrifice and her husband’s money, is where her culpability becomes unambiguous. The crash may be an accident; the cover-up is a choice. Holding those two judgments separately is the mark of a careful reading. It lets you grant Daisy the benefit of the doubt about the impact while still indicting her for everything she does afterward, which is the more damning and the more defensible charge.
The Crash in a Pattern of Reckless Driving
The crash does not arrive without warning. Fitzgerald has been planting reckless cars throughout the novel, so that when the death car finally appears it reads as the culmination of a pattern rather than a bolt from nowhere, and tracing that pattern is part of seeing the crash as the accident that was waiting to happen. After Gatsby’s first party in an earlier chapter, a drunken guest drives a coupé into a ditch and shears off a wheel, then stands in the road utterly baffled that the car will no longer go, insisting it is not his fault and that he was not even trying to drive. The episode is played for comedy, but its logic is the crash’s logic in miniature: a machine wrecked by carelessness, a driver who refuses responsibility, an accident treated as something that simply happened to him rather than something he did.
The pattern deepens in Nick’s exchange with Jordan Baker about her driving. Jordan drives carelessly, passing too close to workmen, and when Nick objects she shrugs that it does not matter because other people will be careful. When he points out that she might meet someone equally careless, she replies that she hopes she never will, because she hates careless people. The exchange is a small masterpiece of dramatic irony, since Jordan is describing the exact condition that will kill Myrtle Wilson, two careless people meeting on a road. Nick’s private judgment, that Jordan is incurably dishonest and avoids clever men because they make her uneasy, ties her bad driving to a bad character, and that linkage of reckless driving to moral recklessness is the thread the crash finally pulls tight.
By the time Daisy fails to stop, the novel has taught the reader to read a car as a test of character, and the test is one the careless rich consistently fail. The wider arc of this association, the way automobiles in the novel function as instruments of heedless privilege, runs through the whole book and is the subject of its own analysis, but the crash is the point where the pattern stops being a recurring image and becomes a recurring image with a corpse beneath it. The earlier wrecks were warnings the characters did not heed, and their refusal to heed them is itself a form of the carelessness that kills Myrtle. The novel does not spring the crash on the reader. It announces it, repeatedly, in a minor key, and then plays it once in full.
The Locked Room: How Wilson’s Confinement of Myrtle Feeds the Chain
The crash cannot be separated from the domestic crisis unfolding inside the garage, and the locked room is the link that connects the Buchanans’ careless drive to Myrtle’s fatal run. On the day of the crash, George Wilson has finally understood that his wife is involved with another man, though he does not know who. His response is to confine her, to lock her upstairs while he makes plans to take her west, away from whatever has been happening. The confinement is presented without sentiment as the act of a desperate, controlling, frightened man, and it is the immediate cause of the manner of Myrtle’s death. She does not wander into the road. She breaks out of a locked room and runs, with the pent force of someone who has been caged, straight into the path of the car.
This detail reframes the crash as the collision of two separate failures of care, one belonging to the rich and one to the poor, meeting on the same stretch of road. Above the valley, the Buchanans and Gatsby treat people as instruments and consequences as someone else’s problem. Below, in the garage, Wilson treats his wife as a possession to be locked away and relocated. Myrtle is crushed between these two carelessnesses, the careless drive of the people who never look back and the careless control of the husband who locks her in. Her death is overdetermined, produced by both at once. She runs because Wilson caged her, and she dies because Daisy did not stop, and neither party was thinking about Myrtle Wilson as a person with a life of her own.
There is a grim symmetry in the geography. Myrtle is killed in front of the garage that is both her home and her prison, by a car driven by the wife of the man she hoped would carry her out of that life. The woman who most wanted to escape the valley of ashes dies at its center, struck down by the glamour she was reaching for. The locked room makes the crash a tragedy of class on both sides of the line, and it ensures that the chain of careless choices the article has tracked is not only the Buchanans’ chain. It runs through the garage as well, and it is the meeting of the two that turns an ordinary evening into the night the novel never recovers from.
Gatsby’s Vigil and the Cost of the Cover-Up
The hours immediately after the crash contain one of the novel’s most quietly devastating images, and it belongs to the crash sequence because it is the first interest payment on Gatsby’s decision to take the blame. After the death car has fled and the cast has scattered, Nick finds Gatsby standing in the dark outside the Buchanan house, having driven Daisy home and then stationed himself in the shrubbery to keep watch. He has appointed himself her protector for the night, ready to intervene if Tom should try to harm her. Nick walks back toward the house and looks through a window, where he sees Tom and Daisy sitting together over cold chicken and ale, not happy exactly, but conspiring, intimate, two people who belong to each other in a way Gatsby will never breach.
The irony is exact and merciless. Gatsby keeps his vigil over a woman who has, at that very moment, already returned to her husband. Nick’s verdict on the scene is one of the book’s most resonant lines of judgment, that Gatsby was watching over nothing. The cover-up that began as devotion has already become absurd. Gatsby has taken on the weight of a death to shield a woman who is, inside the lit window, quietly choosing the man Gatsby spent the evening defeating. His sacrifice is not even acknowledged by its beneficiary. It is offered into a void. This is the price the cover-up exacts on him before it kills him, the price of loving someone enough to absorb a homicide for her while she eats cold chicken with the husband she will never leave.
Reading the vigil as part of the crash sequence, rather than as a separate romantic beat, sharpens the chapter’s argument about who pays. Gatsby’s standing in the dark is the visible form of the blame transfer the article has been tracking. He is literally outside, in the shadows, holding a weight that belongs to the people inside, in the light, who do not even know it is being held for them. The geography of the scene is the geography of the whole cover-up: the careless rich are warm and fed indoors, and the outsider who has taken their consequence stands in the cold garden watching a window. It is the cover-up rendered as a stage picture, and it tells the reader everything about the bargain Gatsby has made and how little he will get for it.
Reading the Crash as the Chapter’s Released Pressure
The crash is best understood as the physical discharge of pressure the chapter has been building since its first page, and seeing the mechanism by which Fitzgerald converts emotional heat into bodily catastrophe is the final piece of reading the sequence as design rather than accident. Chapter 7 is governed by the hottest day of the summer, and the heat is not mere atmosphere. It is the chapter’s engine, pressing on every character, shortening tempers, making thought difficult, turning the Plaza suite into a furnace where Tom finally detonates the confrontation that breaks Gatsby’s dream. By the time the cast leaves the hotel, every person is overheated in both senses, raw from the argument and worn down by the temperature, and they pour out onto the roads in exactly the state least suited to driving them.
The structure of the day is a slow compression followed by a fast release. The morning at the Buchanans’, the decision to flee to the city, the suffocating drive in, the locked confrontation at the Plaza, all of it tightens the spring. The crash is the spring letting go. Fitzgerald marks the contrast in his pacing: pages of airless tension in the suite give way to a sequence on the road told in fast, fragmented strokes, the crowd, the car, the body, the flight into the dark. The deliberation that fills the hotel scene, every word weighed, every glance read, is precisely what evaporates on the road, where a life ends in the time it takes a foot to fail to find a brake. The chapter teaches the reader to feel the difference between a world that examines itself to the point of cruelty and a world that acts without examining itself at all, and it places the death at the exact seam between them.
This is why the crash feels both shocking and inevitable, the two qualities the phrase the accident waiting to happen is meant to hold together. It is shocking because Fitzgerald withholds it, gives it to the reader secondhand and sudden. It is inevitable because everything in the chapter, the heat, the argument, the switched cars, the distraught driver, the caged wife, has been arranged to produce it. The release of pressure had to land somewhere, and the novel’s logic, which routes every consequence of the rich down into the valley of ashes, ensured it would land on Myrtle Wilson. The crash is the chapter’s pressure made fatal, the moment a long, hot, careless day finally costs exactly what carelessness on that scale was always going to cost.
Nick as the Sole Keeper of the Truth
Among the living, only three people know that Daisy was driving: Daisy, Gatsby, and Nick. Gatsby dies within days, and Daisy flees into her marriage and then out of the region entirely, so the burden of the truth comes to rest on Nick alone, the narrator who has spent the book claiming to reserve judgment. The crash is where that claim finally breaks. Nick learns the fact directly from Gatsby during the vigil, and he carries it through the murder, the funeral, and the aftermath, watching the false version harden into accepted history while the people who could correct it choose not to.
This silent knowledge is the engine of Nick’s disillusionment. He sees the careless rich smash a life and retreat into their money, and he sees the truth lost not to any grand conspiracy but to ordinary cowardice and convenience. His decision to leave the East and go home is not a vague distaste for parties; it is the verdict of a man who has held the real story of the crash in his hands and watched everyone with power decline to hear it. When Nick refuses to shake Tom’s hand near the end, the refusal is rooted here, in his knowledge that Tom handed Gatsby’s name to Wilson and that Daisy let it happen. The crash makes Nick the keeper of a truth nobody wants, and carrying it is what turns the tolerant young bond man of the opening into the disgusted moralist of the close. The sequence does not only kill Gatsby. It also, quietly, ends Nick’s capacity to reserve judgment, which the novel had announced as his defining trait on its first page.
How to Write About the Car Crash Sequence in an Essay
The crash is a rich essay subject precisely because it rewards analysis over summary, and the difference between a weak essay and a strong one here is almost entirely the difference between retelling the events and reading the chain of responsibility inside them. A weak essay narrates: Daisy drove, Myrtle ran out, the car hit her, Gatsby took the blame. A strong essay argues: the crash is the novel’s clearest demonstration that carelessness, in the specific sense of acting without tracking consequences, is a function of class, and that the wealthy survive their own recklessness by transferring its cost onto people with less power. The events are your evidence, not your thesis.
To build that thesis, anchor it in the car switch and the cover-up, the two steps most students skip. The switch is where the trap is set and where you can show Tom’s casual dominance turning a flashy car into a misidentified weapon. The cover-up is where the moral verdict lands and where you can contrast Gatsby’s self-sacrificing concealment with Tom’s self-serving disclosure to Wilson. A paragraph that holds those two moments side by side, the man who lies to protect and the man who lies to destroy, will say more about the novel’s view of love and power than five paragraphs of plot. Quote sparingly and precisely. The phrase the death car is worth citing because the language itself performs the evasion you are analyzing, and Gatsby’s quiet decision to say he was driving is worth citing because it compresses his whole character into a single sentence.
Avoid the trap that caps so many essays on this scene: writing as though Gatsby drove. Examiners notice it immediately, and it collapses your argument, because the entire moral structure of the chapter depends on the gap between the driver and the one who is blamed. State plainly that Daisy was at the wheel, that Gatsby chose the blame, and that Tom redirected it, and you will have the spine of an argument that the careless rich are protected by the structures the novel quietly anatomizes. For a thesis with reach, connect the crash forward to the deaths it causes and outward to the novel’s final judgment on Tom and Daisy, so that the sequence becomes not an isolated tragedy but the mechanism by which the book makes its case.
You can read and annotate the full Chapter 7 text, trace the crash sequence line by line, and search the novel for every appearance of the yellow car when you read and annotate The Great Gatsby free on VaultBook, whose annotated edition, close-reading tools, quotation search, and character and theme trackers make it straightforward to follow the chain of cause through the chapter and to gather the exact passages an essay needs. It is the natural next step for turning this reading into your own.
The Verdict: Carelessness Made Fatal
The car crash sequence is the novel’s proof, offered in the form of a death, that carelessness is not harmless. For most of the book the word attaches to small things, a smashed coupé after a party, a casual cruelty, a broken promise, the ambient recklessness of people who never have to clean up after themselves. The crash gathers all of that into one event and gives it a body. It shows the chain by which a series of unremarkable, self-interested choices, a dominance move with a car, a distraught woman taking the wheel, a panicked failure to stop, a lie of love, a lie of convenience, locks together into something lethal. Not one of those choices is monstrous alone. Together they kill three people.
The lasting verdict of the sequence is about who pays. Daisy drives the death car and walks away into her marriage and her money. Gatsby, who only loved her, dies for it. Myrtle, who only wanted more than the valley of ashes allowed her, dies running toward a fantasy. The crash sorts the cast by power, and the sorting is exact: the people with the most money absorb the least consequence, and the people with the least money absorb the most. That is the chapter’s argument, and it is not sentimental. The tragedy is not simply that a good man dies. The tragedy is moral and social, a demonstration that the careless rich smash things and creatures and let other people answer for the wreckage. Read the crash as the accident that was always going to happen, assembled from choices rather than delivered by chance, and you have read it the way the novel asks to be read, as analysis of a chain of responsibility rather than a sad story about a bad night on the road.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What happens in the car crash sequence in The Great Gatsby?
On the drive home from the Plaza Hotel in Chapter 7, Daisy is driving Gatsby’s yellow car when Myrtle Wilson runs into the road and is struck and killed. The car does not stop and continues into the dark. Tom, Nick, and Jordan arrive later in Tom’s car to find a crowd outside Wilson’s garage and Myrtle dead. The events are reconstructed afterward from Michaelis, the witness who saw Myrtle rush out. That same night Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was at the wheel but that he intends to take responsibility himself, which begins the cover-up over who was driving. The sequence is the second catastrophe of the chapter, following the confrontation in the hotel suite, and it sets the novel’s final deaths in motion.
Q: Whose car was it and who was driving when Myrtle died?
The car was Gatsby’s, a bright yellow vehicle that everyone in the valley of ashes recognized as his. At the moment of the crash, however, Daisy Buchanan was driving it, with Gatsby beside her as a passenger. This split is the single most important fact in the sequence. The vehicle belonged to one man, but the hands on the wheel were a different person’s. Gatsby explains to Nick that Daisy took the wheel because she was overwrought after the scene at the Plaza and thought driving would calm her nerves. Because the car was visibly Gatsby’s, and because Gatsby chose to conceal that Daisy drove, almost everyone in the novel comes to believe Gatsby was the driver, which is exactly the false impression the cover-up produces.
Q: Was Gatsby driving the car that killed Myrtle?
No. Gatsby was a passenger; Daisy was driving. The text is clear on this when Gatsby tells Nick directly that Daisy was at the wheel and that he will say he was driving to protect her. There is no later twist that overturns this. The widespread belief that Gatsby drove comes from the way the novel dramatizes the cover-up: the car was his, Tom assumes Gatsby’s guilt, Wilson is told the car belonged to Gatsby, and the actual driver, Daisy, retreats into silence. The reader who corrects this misreading sees the heart of the chapter, because the entire moral force of the sequence depends on the gap between the person who caused the death and the person who is eventually blamed and killed for it.
Q: How is the car crash covered up in The Great Gatsby?
The cover-up has two parts performed by two men for opposite reasons. Gatsby conceals that Daisy was driving and announces that he will take the blame himself, an act of pure devotion as he keeps a useless vigil outside her house. Tom, separately, tells the grief-maddened George Wilson that the yellow car belonged to Gatsby, knowing it will point an armed man at his rival. Tom does this to protect his wife, eliminate Gatsby, and reassure himself. The two acts interlock so that the person who actually drove the car, Daisy, is never suspected, while the blame lands entirely on Gatsby, who did not cause the death. No single lie accomplishes this; it is the alignment of everyone’s separate interests around one convenient mistake.
Q: Why did Tom and Gatsby switch cars before the crash?
When the group decided to drive into the city to escape the heat, Tom proposed taking Gatsby’s yellow car for himself, sending Gatsby and Daisy in Tom’s blue coupé. On the surface it is a small thing, a man wanting to drive the flashy automobile his rival owns, but it is really a move in their ongoing contest, Tom taking and flaunting Gatsby’s prize property. The switch matters because while Tom drives the yellow car into the city, he stops for gas at Wilson’s garage, where Myrtle watches from the window and wrongly fixes the yellow car in her mind as Tom’s. So when the same car returns, she runs toward it believing her lover is inside. After the Plaza they switch back, putting Daisy at the wheel of the death car.
Q: Why did Myrtle run in front of the yellow car?
Myrtle ran into the road because she believed the yellow car was Tom’s and that Tom was inside it. Earlier that day, when Tom stopped for gas while driving Gatsby’s yellow car into the city, Myrtle watched from her upstairs window and assumed the car belonged to him. She also saw Jordan beside him and assumed, with a jealous shock, that the elegant woman was Tom’s wife. Her husband had just locked her upstairs after realizing she was having an affair. When the same yellow car came back down the road hours later, Myrtle broke free and rushed toward it, desperate to reach the man she loved and perhaps to confront the woman she thought was his wife. Her fatal mistake was a chain of misidentifications she could not have corrected.
Q: What is the death car in The Great Gatsby?
The death car is the name the newspapers give to the vehicle that strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson, and Fitzgerald lets the phrase stand in the narration. The car is Gatsby’s yellow automobile, driven by Daisy at the time of the crash. The label is significant because it drains the moment of human agency: a car cannot commit a killing, only a driver can, yet the phrasing makes the machine the actor. The prose builds the sentences so that the car comes out of the darkness, wavers, and disappears, as though no person were inside making choices. This grammatical erasure of the driver mirrors the cover-up the characters perform, letting the object carry blame a person has earned, and it shows the language enacting the evasion before any character speaks a lie.
Q: How is the car crash a chain of careless choices?
The crash is built from a series of decisions, each careless in the specific sense of being made without tracking its consequences. The group decides to drive to the city to escape the heat. Tom switches cars as a dominance move, fixing the yellow car in Myrtle’s mind. After the Plaza they switch back, letting the most distraught person, Daisy, take the wheel. Daisy fails to stop after the impact. Gatsby decides to take the blame, and Tom decides to name the car to Wilson. No single choice is monstrous on its own, but the chain is lethal. This is why the novel calls the crash the accident that was waiting to happen rather than a piece of bad luck. Carelessness, treated as a way of living, produces the death as its natural endpoint.
Q: Why does it matter that the car was yellow and Gatsby’s?
The two facts work together to deepen the novel’s argument about wealth. Yellow in the book is gold gone slightly rotten, the bright surface of money with corruption underneath, and Gatsby’s car was first introduced as a thing of rich cream and gleaming nickel, an emblem of his manufactured splendor. When that bright instrument rolls through the gray valley of ashes and kills a working-class woman, the color binds the crash to the book’s whole claim that the brightness of the rich is paid for by a cost dumped out of sight. That the car is Gatsby’s also enables the cover-up, since the visible owner becomes the assumed driver. The vehicle’s color and ownership turn a road accident into a compact image of how privilege both causes harm and escapes it.
Q: How does the crash shift the blame onto Gatsby?
The blame moves onto Gatsby through the combination of his own choice and Tom’s. Gatsby chooses to conceal that Daisy was driving and to say he was at the wheel, removing the true driver from suspicion. Tom, asked by Wilson who owned the yellow car, names Gatsby, knowing it will direct a vengeful, armed man across the bay. Tom assumes Gatsby was both the driver and Myrtle’s lover because that assumption is convenient. The result is a closed circuit: Daisy, who caused the death, is shielded by her wealth and marriage, the law never learns the truth, and the punishment falls on the man with the least power and the most love. The redistribution follows the contours of privilege exactly, which is the chapter’s harshest revelation.
Q: Where does the car crash happen in The Great Gatsby?
The crash happens in the valley of ashes, the gray industrial corridor between West Egg and Manhattan, directly in front of George Wilson’s garage and beneath the faded billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The setting is not neutral. The novel has established the valley as the dumping ground for the consequences of the rich, the literal ash heap their industry and pleasure produce. When the death car passes back through this territory, the place the wealthy spend the summer ignoring, it collects its toll. Myrtle’s death in front of her own husband’s failing garage gives the crash its bitter geography, since the woman who longed to escape the valley is killed at its center by a rich man’s car as she runs toward the glamour she could never reach.
Q: Why doesn’t the car stop after hitting Myrtle?
The car does not stop because Daisy, driving in a state of distress after the Plaza confrontation, panics. The witness Michaelis reports that the car appeared to hesitate, to waver as if the driver almost corrected, before accelerating away into the dark. That fraction of a second is what makes the failure so damning: a different choice was physically available and was not taken. Gatsby later tells Nick that he tried to grab the wheel, but the car kept going. The non-stop is the link in the chain that turns a collision into a hit-and-run and sets the cover-up in motion, because once the car has fled, the question of who was driving becomes a secret that Gatsby and Daisy can choose to keep, and choose they do.
Q: What does the car crash reveal about the Buchanans?
The crash exposes the Buchanans as people protected by their wealth from the consequences of their own recklessness. Daisy drives the death car, fails to stop, and then retreats into her marriage and her money, never touched by the law or by Wilson. Tom, rather than seeking the truth, hands Wilson the name that will get Gatsby killed, solving his own problems at the cost of another man’s life. Neither faces any reckoning. The sequence shows that the careless rich smash things and creatures and then let others answer for the wreckage, closing ranks to survive. The crash is the clearest evidence in the novel that privilege is not just comfort but immunity, the power to cause harm and route the blame elsewhere.
Q: How does the car crash sequence connect to Gatsby’s death?
The crash is the cause from which Gatsby’s death directly descends. By choosing to take the blame for Daisy, Gatsby keeps himself at the Buchanan house, passive and waiting, in the days that follow. Meanwhile Tom tells the grieving George Wilson that the yellow car belonged to Gatsby, which sends Wilson across the bay convinced that Gatsby both killed his wife and was her lover. Wilson shoots Gatsby in his pool and then kills himself. Gatsby’s murder and Wilson’s suicide are not separate disasters; they are the second and third deaths in a chain that began when Myrtle ran into the road. Reading the crash as the engine of the ending shows how a single stretch of road generates the novel’s entire tragic close.
Q: Why does Fitzgerald narrate the crash secondhand?
Fitzgerald keeps Nick in Tom’s car, behind the death car, so the reader never sees the impact directly and instead arrives on the aftermath, the crowd, the stopped cars, the body. The crash reaches the reader the way scandal reaches a town, through a witness and through the impersonal phrasing of a newspaper. This distance is a deliberate effect. It places the reader in the position of the cast, assembling the event from fragments, since no one but the reader ever holds the whole truth. It also lets the language perform the evasion the characters will soon perform aloud, with the car rather than a person presented as the actor. The secondhand narration mirrors the moral situation of the chapter, a world where responsibility is scattered and no one owns the whole.
Q: Did Gatsby try to stop the car or protect Myrtle?
Gatsby was a passenger and could not control the car at the moment of impact. He tells Nick afterward that he tried to reach for the wheel, but Daisy was driving and the car did not stop. Gatsby’s real intervention comes after the crash, in the form of the blame he chooses to absorb. His protective instinct is aimed entirely at Daisy, not at the situation as a whole. He keeps a vigil outside the Buchanan house, watching over a woman who has already gone back to her husband, and he resolves to tell the world he was driving. His protection is devotion turned self-destructive, since by shielding Daisy he makes himself the visible owner of the death car and the target Tom will later hand to Wilson.
Q: What is the difference between the car crash and Myrtle’s death scene?
The two are the same event read at different scales. The car crash sequence is the whole motion, from the decision to drive to the city, through the car switch, the impact, the failure to stop, and the cover-up that reroutes the blame. It is concerned with the chain of cause and responsibility across the chapter. The death scene narrows the focus to the brutal instant of the impact itself, Myrtle running out and being struck, read for its imagery and its human horror. The sequence asks who is responsible and how the blame moves; the death moment asks what the killing feels like and means as an image. Reading both gives the full picture, the precise mechanics of the chain and the visceral center it produces.
Q: How should I write a thesis about the car crash sequence?
Build a thesis that argues rather than retells. A strong claim treats the crash as the novel’s demonstration that carelessness is a function of class, where the wealthy survive their own recklessness by transferring its cost onto people with less power. Use the car switch and the cover-up as your central evidence, since they are the steps that set the trap and deliver the verdict. Contrast Gatsby’s self-sacrificing concealment with Tom’s self-serving disclosure to Wilson. State plainly that Daisy drove and Gatsby chose the blame, because writing as though Gatsby drove collapses the argument. Then connect the crash forward to the deaths it causes and outward to the novel’s final judgment on the Buchanans, so the sequence becomes the mechanism by which the book makes its case rather than an isolated sad event.
