The Great Gatsby

here 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 champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. 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. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

Nick finally attends one of Gatsby's legendary parties. The scene is extravagant—hundreds of guests, endless food and drink, music, dancing, and chaos. People come and go, most never meeting their host. The party is both glamorous and empty—full of people but devoid of genuine connection. Nick meets Jordan Baker again, and through her, he finally meets Gatsby. The meeting is unexpected—Gatsby is not the larger-than-life figure Nick imagined, but a man with a careful, almost rehearsed manner. Gatsby reveals that he and Nick served in the same division during the war, establishing a connection. The chapter shows the contrast between Gatsby's public persona (the extravagant host) and his private self (the careful, almost vulnerable man). It also reveals the emptiness of the parties—people come for the spectacle, not for connection. The chapter ends with Nick realizing that Gatsby is watching the green light across the water, the same light he saw him reaching for in Chapter 1.