Owl Eyes

Owl Eyes is a minor character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby whose brief appearances carry an outsized thematic weight. He is the only guest who sees through Gatsby's elaborate stagecraft to the reality beneath, and he is also the only one of Gatsby's hundreds of partygoers to attend his funeral. His role is that of an accidental truth-teller, a man whose drunkenness paradoxically grants him a clarity that the sober, self-interested characters lack.

Identity and First Appearance

Owl Eyes is a stout, middle-aged man who wears enormous owl-eyed spectacles. Nick Carraway first meets him in Gatsby's Gothic library during the first party Nick attends. The man is sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. When Nick and Jordan Baker enter, he wheels around excitedly and demands to know what they think of the library. He has already ascertained that the books are real—"Absolutely real—have pages and everything"—and he is triumphant in his discovery. He had expected them to be "nice durable cardboard." He rushes to the bookcases and returns with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures," insisting that it is a "bona-fide piece of printed matter" and that Gatsby is "a regular Belasco." He notes with approval that Gatsby "knew when to stop, too—didn't cut the pages." The library, he implies, is a perfect stage set: the books are real, but they are unread, their pages uncut. Owl Eyes is the only character who notices this detail, and his drunken wonder at the "thoroughness" and "realism" of the deception makes him the first person to articulate the central paradox of Gatsby's identity: the dream is built on real props, but the dream itself remains untouched.

The Car Accident

Later that same night, after the party has wound down, Owl Eyes is involved in a bizarre car accident just outside Gatsby's drive. A new coupe has left the drive and ended up in a ditch, violently shorn of one wheel. Owl Eyes, wearing a long duster, stands in the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire and from the tire to the observers in a "pleasant, puzzled way." He explains that he knows "nothing whatever about mechanics" and "very little about driving—next to nothing." When asked if he ran into the wall, he indignantly insists, "I wasn't even trying." The accident, he reveals, was not his fault because he was not driving; there is another man in the car. The second man, a pale, dangling individual, steps out of the wreck, blinded by headlights and confused by the horns, and asks calmly if they have run out of gas. The scene is comic and absurd, a perfect coda to the chaotic excess of Gatsby's party. Owl Eyes, who had been the voice of critical insight in the library, is now the unwitting center of a farce, demonstrating that the same man who can see through a grand illusion can also be utterly helpless in the face of a mundane reality.

The Funeral and Final Judgment

Owl Eyes's most significant appearance comes at Gatsby's funeral, the only event in the novel where his role shifts from comic observer to moral witness. Nick Carraway, having failed to find anyone else to attend, is standing in the rain at the cemetery when he hears a car stop and the sound of someone splashing after them over the soggy ground. It is Owl Eyes. Nick has not seen him since the night of the library, and he does not even know his name. The rain pours down his thick glasses, and he takes them off and wipes them to see the protecting canvas unrolled from Gatsby's grave. As the minister murmurs, "Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on," Owl Eyes says "Amen to that" in a brave voice. After the brief service, he speaks to Nick by the gate. When Nick tells him that he could not get anyone to come to the house, Owl Eyes is incredulous: "Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds." He takes off his glasses and wipes them again, outside and in, and then delivers the novel's most direct and compassionate verdict on Gatsby: "The poor son-of-a-bitch." This line, spoken by the only stranger who cared enough to come, stands in stark contrast to the indifference of the rich and the self-serving evasions of Gatsby's associates. Owl Eyes, the man who had first seen Gatsby's library as a triumph of artifice, is the one who finally sees Gatsby as a human being worthy of pity.