“I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
In Nick’s unavailing attempts to become disengaged in the prattle of his intoxicated company, Fitzgerald uses imagery of the internal struggle of Nick ultimately to manifest the underlying endeavor that the American society was dealing with. Fitzgerald describes Nick’s failure to become unattached from the group as a result of ropes, tying him down to his chair. In reality, Nick himself is the only ropes that are holding him down to the group.
Unlike the rest of the town, Nick has the ability to look through the glamour of the aristocracy and understand that although these people had almost all the luxuries of life, they were rather naive and impoverished in the riches of the ideals and values that should have existed in a town filled with such “sophisticated” people. Yet, Nick longs for acceptance from the aristocratic and wealthy groups of society even though he realizes that the wealthy were only wasting away in their greed and self-absorption. Rather than elude this tainted society, Nick attempts to satisfy and gain popularity from those in it.
Nick describes himself as a bystander in the streets lurking in darkness casually watching those above him while also being in the group of these people that was being curiously watched by the bystander below. Fitzgerald portrays this struggle of Nick in a high-class society to express his own views and opinions of the society he lived in. While Fitzgerald lived in the 1920’s, a time of an American dream of discovery and the pursuit of happiness, he destroys the concept of the American dream in the end of the novel.
Rather than boost the moral of the American dream, Fitzgerald seems to mock this concept of individualism entering the Jazz Age. Nick was both enchanted and repelled by this materialistic lifestyle in which many people were greedy social climbers that were scrambling for more wealth and popularity in society. The passage is an oxymoron in that for each illustration that Fitzgerald begins to describe, he expresses Nick to be on both sides of the world. This reflects Fitzgerald’s purpose to portray his view of America, a fruitless and corrupted society whose value had decayed as a result of a newfound materialism.
