The Grave Gatsby

So this is an experiment I am trying inspired by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Lemmie Know what you think. I bolded some of the parts I altered, and you have to figure out the others!

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like devouring any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. And eat the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, and the buttocks first. They're the best."

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made the victimsof not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person. I have always had an eye for seeking out the meatiest parts of the human body and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. If am privy to any more this, I am afraid i may snap and chew off a finger or two. And if I were to find another like me in this world, how would i react? Maybe I've all ready eaten others like me for I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted to give into riotous and violent excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart, lungs, and brains. Only Gatsby, the ghoul who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “Creatively divine temperament.”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams during the day that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and blood soaked pieces of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Beanes are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Donnor, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, Alfred Packer who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business and candy shop that my father carries on to-day.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him, and act like him as well—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless, 25 pound heaver, and and plenty bags of food to go around. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe. No corpses to be found anywhere—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man.And if any of those single men started to vanish, no one would take notcie. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, seeing which was the most crowded, and finally said, “Why—ye—es,” with very happy, excited faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two....

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city dark, low light would be the best. It was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until I got hungry—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. He mutterings sounded like spells meant to ward off evil. I later realized she was directing them at me.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. I almost hated to eat him.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. I'd have to stay inside for most of it, sunlight being a henderance for a ghoul such as myself, but be that as it may I was still excited.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. Cook books mainly,maybe some on taxadermy. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the “Yale News.”—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

Okay, and here's the end paragraph.

...And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green eye at the socket of Daisy’s head, and bit down. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that I was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green eye, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. Death eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . farther into forever.... And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, Dirt against coffins, borne back ceaselessly into the past.