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with which he bought his mansion, the money that pays for Gatsby’s extrava‑ gant parties comes from criminal activities associated with Meyer Wolfsheim, the novel’s most sinister and one of its most vulgar characters. And as Nick points out, Gatsby’s guests “conducted themselves” in extremely vulgar fashion, “according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks” (45; ch. 3). Almost everyone is rude and obnoxious. They gossip mercilessly about their host, whom few have met or care to meet. And the crowd, itself in varying degrees of drunken hysteria, is frequently treated to a drunken display by one or another of its members. There is, for example, a young woman who “dumps” down a cocktail “for courage” and “dances out alone on the canvass to perform” (45; ch. 3); “a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter” (51; ch. 3); a driver so drunk that, when his car winds up in a ditch beside the driveway, “violently shorn of one wheel” (58; ch. 3), he doesn’t realize it has stopped moving; and a drunken young girl who has to have her “head stuck in a pool” (113; ch. 6) to stop her from screaming. The setting is described, however, in an intensely romantic fashion: “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the cham‑ pagne and the stars” (43; ch. 3). The “premature moon” is “produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket” (47; ch. 3), and even the refreshments seem enchanted: a “tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight” (47; ch. 3), and on “buffet tables garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold” (44; ch. 3). The setting is thus described as if it were a quiet pastoral scene—“blue gardens,” “whisperings,” “stars”—in a mythical king‑ dom where the moon is somehow magically produced “premature[ly]”; where cocktails “floa[t]” toward those who desire them; and where food is “bewitched.” Of course, we must remember that Nick is our narrator. We see the settings in the novel through his eyes. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that, in those scenes in which setting and action are at odds, the unfulfilled longing evoked is Nick’s. He yearns for a world of pastoral beauty, like the world he knew as a youth in Wisconsin, but that world is gone. The combined effects of adulthood, World War I, and his own lack of purpose have wiped it out for him. But opulence creates romantic possibilities. What Nick said of Gatsby is also true of himself: he “was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves” (157; ch. 8). Nick longs for the romantic possibilities he sees in the world of the wealthy although most of the people who inhabit that world seem blind to, or take for granted, its idyllic quality. As these examples illustrate, The Great Gatsby’s haunting imagery tells us that unfulfilled longing is universal and inevitable. No matter who we are or what
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