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 lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress.
Chapter 9 · Narrator
Context
Nick describes a recurring dream or vision that has come to represent the East for him—a surreal, El Greco-like nightscape of distorted houses and anonymous figures carrying a drunken, jeweled woman on a stretcher to the wrong house, where no one knows her name or cares about her.
Analysis
The personification of houses 'crouching' under a 'sullen' sky transforms the landscape into something alive and malevolent, while the El Greco reference invokes that painter's characteristic distortion of form—suggesting that Nick's perception of the East has been permanently warped by his experiences. The dreamscape condenses the novel's entire moral vision: wealth ('jewels'), excess ('drunken'), anonymity ('no one knows her name'), and misidentification ('the wrong house') combine into a single image of a world where surfaces are maintained ('dress suits,' 'white evening dress') while all human connection has dissolved.
How to Use in Essay
Excellent for essays on how the novel uses expressionistic or surrealist techniques to convey moral critique, or for analyzing how this dream-image functions as Nick's psychological summary of everything the East represents—spectacle without substance, care without knowledge.