Mr. Gatz seems to be torn between grief and pride. He obviously very much grieves his son's death, his "eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears," even though death is no longer something to which he, as an older man, is unaccustomed. One never expects one's child to die first, and Mr. Gatz left Minnesota as soon as he read about the news of his son's death in the Chicago papers. Nick says that Mr. Gatz's eyes "[see] nothing" when he arrives, and Gatsby's father can only insist that the man who killed him "'must have been mad.'"
However, when Mr. Gatz really looks around him at the magnificent mansion his son had worked for, purchased, and lived in, his grief "mixed with an awed pride." He insists that the family always knew that his son had a bright future ahead of him because he was always so very intelligent and hardworking. He insists that Gatsby would have been great and helped to "'build up the country'" like James J. Hill, who was a prominent railroad executive known as the Empire Builder during his lifetime.
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