Great Gatsby Isolation Quotes

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 3, it is ironic that Nick expresses his uncomfortableness since he – unlike Gatsby’s other guests – has been invited to attend the lavish party at Gatsby’s mansion.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3. Nick Carraway is watching the party unfold in Myrtle’s Manhattan apartment. This passage illustrates the duality of city life: the clamor and the ‘constant flicker of men and women’ in the city that never sleeps, and on the other hand the vast loneliness that some people experience in the big city.

‘Your place looks like the World’s Fair,’ I said.
‘Does it?’ He turned his eyes toward it absently. ‘I have been glancing into some of the rooms. Let’s go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car.’
‘It’s too late.’
‘Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming-pool? I haven’t made use of it all summer.’
‘I’ve got to go to bed.’
‘All right.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 5, Gatsby has a house full of people. But all he wants is one friend to go swimming with him. Despite his wealth and grand parties, Gatsby is a lonely man and doesn’t have any true friends.

Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age….So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7. Nick is struck with loneliness as it dawns on him that it’s his 30th birthday. He fears the new decade will bring him isolation and he is also aware of his own mortality. Jordan comforts him. Unlike Daisy and Gatsby who look back to the past, he and Jordan look to the future.

Next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfsheim, which asked for information and urged him to come out on the next train. That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it. I was sure he’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure a there’d be a wire from Daisy before noon – but neither a wire nor Mr. Wolfsheim arrived; no one arrived except more police and photographers and newspaper men. When the butler brought back Wolfsheim’s answer I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, after Gatsby’s death Nick realizes just how alone Gatsby was. lonliness is one of the major themes in the novel.

After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears. He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms, his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, Gatsby’s father who traveled half-way around the continent to see his son. It is as if he can’t process that his son is dead, or that this mansion belonged to him.

A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing, and I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did Gatsby’s father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister glanced several times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, we all die alone. Some of are buried alone, none more so than the great man Gatsby, for whom nobody besides the owl-eyed man, Nick and Gatsby’s dad turns up for his funeral. In this material world where money reigns there are no spiritual values. God and religion are dead, and the American dream corrupted. When Gatsby is stripped of his material possessions in death, those who flocked to his parties in life don’t bother to attend his funeral.

The poor son-of-a-bitch.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, Owl Eyes at Gatsby’s funeral, the only party-goer there. He is the one person who seems to feel sorry for Gatsby, aside from his father and Nick. The Owl-Eyed Man in The Great Gatsby has been compared to the Dr. T. J. Eckleburg billboard with its ‘all-seeing’ eyes. Both are symbols of a spectator god. His attendance as one of the few to attend Gatsby’s funeral could be seen as meaning that God is watching when humans are laid to rest and Gatsby was worthy of his presence at his funeral.
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