West Egg
West Egg is one of the two unusual land formations on Long Island Sound, a slender, riotous island extending due east of New York. Twenty miles from the city, a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere. To the wingless, a more arresting phenomenon than their physical resemblance is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. West Egg is the less fashionable of the two, a tag that expresses the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. Across the courtesy bay, the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glitter along the water, representing established wealth and social position. West Egg, by contrast, is the domain of the newly rich, those who have acquired their fortunes recently and lack the inherited status of their East Egg neighbors.
Geography and Architecture
Nick Carraway's house is at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rent for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on his right is a colossal affair by any standard—a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. This is Gatsby's mansion. Nick's own house is an eyesore, but it is a small eyesore, and it has been overlooked, so he has a view of the water, a partial view of his neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month. The architecture of West Egg reflects the tastes of its inhabitants: grandiose, imitative of European styles, and built for display rather than for the quiet comfort of old money.
Social Character and Inhabitants
West Egg is a world of its own, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it has no consciousness of being so. The community is populated by those who have made their money through various means, often dubious. Gatsby's parties draw a vast and motley crowd from both eggs and New York, including bootleggers, movie people, gamblers, and social climbers. The atmosphere is one of raw vigor that chafes under the old euphemisms, and the inhabitants are herded along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. When Daisy Buchanan visits Gatsby's party, she is appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented place that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village. She sees something awful in the very simplicity she fails to understand. Tom Buchanan, with his arrogant eyes, looks around the crowd and declares he doesn't know a soul there, a pointed dismissal of the entire community.
Narrative Significance
West Egg is the setting for the novel's central drama. It is from his West Egg mansion that Gatsby reaches out toward the green light at the end of Daisy's dock across the bay in East Egg. It is here that he stages his lavish parties, hoping to attract her attention, and here that he finally reunites with her. The geographical separation between West Egg and East Egg symbolizes the social chasm that Gatsby cannot cross, no matter how much wealth he accumulates. After Gatsby's death, his house stands empty, the grass on his lawn grown as long as Nick's. An obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stands out clearly in the moonlight on the white steps. Nick erases it, drawing his shoe raspingly along the stone. The house becomes a huge incoherent failure, a monument to a dream that could not be realized. In Nick's more fantastic dreams, West Egg figures as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon.
