His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches—once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano.
Chapter 8 · Narrator
Context
After the events of the previous night, Nick crosses to Gatsby's house in the early morning hours. Together they wander through the dark mansion searching for cigarettes, navigating rooms that now feel alien and oppressive without the parties that once filled them.
Analysis
The simile of curtains 'like pavilions' and the 'ghostly piano' transform Gatsby's mansion from a site of spectacular entertainment into a haunted ruin—the very spaces designed for excess now register only as emptiness and disorientation. The house's enormity, previously a marker of achievement, becomes an index of isolation: stripped of guests and purpose, it reveals that Gatsby's wealth was never substantial but always theatrical, and without its audience it collapses into mere dark, dusty volume.
How to Use in Essay
Effective for essays on how the novel reveals the hollowness of material accumulation once its social function disappears, or for analyzing Gatsby's mansion as a space that only exists meaningfully through performance and spectacle.