The Great Gatsby
Scene #3 · Chapter 3
Nick attends one of Gatsby's lavish parties, where hundreds of uninvited guests consume champagne and gossip about their mysterious host. Nick searches for Gatsby among the crowd and strikes up a conversation with a young man who turns out to be Gatsby himself. Gatsby smiles with concentrated charm and calls Nick "old sport," revealing himself to be younger and more elegant than the wild rumors suggest. Before parting, Gatsby pulls Jordan Baker aside for a private conversation that lasts over an hour.
Gatsby's anonymity at his own party reveals that the spectacle exists solely to attract Daisy's attention from across the bay, not for his own enjoyment. His immediate warmth toward Nick and private conversation with Jordan set in motion his plan to reunite with Daisy. The contrast between Gatsby's genuine courtesy and his guests' parasitic behavior establishes him as separate from the careless wealthy people surrounding him.
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
Chapter 3 · Narrator
Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
Chapter 3 · Narrator
I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.
Chapter 3 · Narrator
I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited—they went there.
Chapter 3 · Narrator