Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of nonolfactory money.
Chapter 4 · Narrator
Context
As Gatsby and Nick drive across the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan, Nick describes the cityscape in a passage that blends sensory wonder with economic critique. This description immediately follows Gatsby's display of his police commissioner's card—another demonstration of his mysterious influence.
Analysis
The neologism 'nonolfactory money' brilliantly condenses the novel's critique of wealth into a single phrase: this is money that doesn't smell, either because it has been laundered clean of its origins or because it exists as pure abstraction divorced from labor. The metaphor of buildings as 'sugar lumps all built with a wish' frames the city as a confection—sweet, insubstantial, and constructed from desire rather than material reality—echoing the illusory nature of the American Dream itself.
How to Use in Essay
Ideal for essays on Fitzgerald's critique of capitalism and the abstraction of wealth from labor, or for analyzing how the novel represents New York City as the spatial embodiment of American Dream mythology.