He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that he could "come over" some afternoon to a stranger's garden.
Chapter 4 · Narrator
Context
Jordan has just asked Nick to invite Daisy to tea so Gatsby can 'come over' from next door. Nick reflects on the enormous disproportion between Gatsby's five-year campaign of wealth accumulation and the modest simplicity of his actual request.
Analysis
The metaphor of Gatsby dispensing 'starlight to casual moths' reframes his legendary parties as mere instruments of attraction—bait for a specific moth (Daisy) who never came—while the juxtaposition between a mansion's worth of spectacle and the humble request to visit 'a stranger's garden' creates devastating situational irony. The quotation marks around 'come over' emphasize the absurd gap between the cosmic scale of Gatsby's preparation and the domestic banality of his goal, encapsulating the novel's vision of the American Dream as monumental effort directed toward an impossibly simple desire.
How to Use in Essay
One of the novel's best quotes for essays on the disproportion between Gatsby's means and ends, or for arguing that the American Dream's tragedy lies in the impossibility of recapturing something as simple as a lost moment through material accumulation.