Great Gasby

That’s my middle west – not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly upadaptable to Eastern life. Even when the East excited me the most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old – even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lusterless mood. In the foreground four solemn me in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at the house— the wrong house. But no one knows the women’s name, and no one cares. (page 176)

1. Lost Swede towns – Nick talks about the hometown he’s returned to and how everything the town stood for has changed and is “lost”. The “Swede” refers to the popular “Swedish” inhabitants that flooded the area during mass Swedish emigration.

2. Thrilling returning trains – the “trains” symbolize the memories of his childhood and his past in Minnesota and how they return as he did.

3. Deficiency in common – The phrase “in common” binds all of them...