It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.
Chapter 7 · Narrator
Context
At the opening of Chapter 7, Nick reports that Gatsby has abruptly ceased his extravagant parties. He has dismissed his servants and replaced them with associates of Wolfshiem's to prevent gossip, because Daisy has been visiting him regularly in the afternoons.
Analysis
The allusion to Trimalchio—the vulgar freedman in Petronius's Satyricon who throws lavish banquets to disguise his low origins—frames Gatsby's entire party-giving career as a performance of wealth that was never authentic but always instrumental. The symbolic extinction of lights signals that Gatsby's public spectacle existed solely to attract Daisy; once she is won, the display becomes unnecessary, revealing that his materialism was never about pleasure or status for its own sake but functioned as an elaborate courtship ritual directed at a single audience.
How to Use in Essay
Ideal for essays on how Gatsby's wealth serves purely as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, or for discussing the Trimalchio allusion as a key to understanding Gatsby's relationship to the nouveau riche tradition and the performative nature of his American Dream.