Nick komt aan in West Egg

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I have been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,' he said, 'just remember that not all people in this world have been as privileged as you.' He didn't say more, but we have always understood each other particularly well without much being said, and I understood that he meant a great deal more by it.

As a result, I have the tendency to suspend all judgment, a habit that has made many peculiar characters accessible to me and also made me the victim of quite a few seasoned bores. The abnormal mind quickly notices this quality and immediately clings to it when it appears in a normal person, and so it happened that I was wrongly accused at university of being a schemer because I knew about the secret heartache of wild, unknown young men.

For the most part these confidences offered themselves unsolicited – often I have pretended to be asleep, or not present with my mind, or possessed a hostile lack of seriousness when I realized through an unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was hanging in the air; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the words in which they express them, are usually a form of plagiarism and marred by obvious omissions.

Suspending judgment is a matter of infinite hope. I am still somewhat afraid that I miss something when I forget, as my father presumptuously suggested and I presumptuously repeat, that a sense of fundamental decency is not equally distributed at birth.

And after having boasted like this about my tolerance, I must admit that it has its limits. Behavior may be founded on hard rock or on wet marshland, but at a given moment I no longer care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East Coast last autumn, I felt that I wanted to see the world forever in uniform and in a sort of moral at-attention posture; I wanted no more boisterous excursions with a privileged glimpse into the human heart.

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempted from my reaction – Gatsby, who symbolized everything for which I have a sincere contempt. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then he had something magnificent, a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those complicated machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

This receptiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability that is dignified with the broad name 'creative temperament' – it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a readiness for romance such as I have never encountered in anyone else and which it's not likely that I will ever encounter again.