F. Scott Fitzgerald
In this dialogue-based section, minor characters carry much of the significance. Specifically, the hordes of former party guests and Gatsby's acquaintance Wolfsheim because apparently it was impossible to get a novel published before 1950 without a shady-looking Jewish minor character.
I know, right?
After the summer of parties, Nick bothered to write down every guest he noticed there. While this action suggests that Nick is much more observant than the guests themselves, the sheer number and lack of distinction between the names almost makes all of the guests seem like one ill-informed monolith. Almost all of the guests seem to have impulsive (and plain wrong) theories about Gatsby. "'He's a bootlegger,; said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. 'One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil'" (Fitzgerald, 61). As I have mentioned before, among this group of people, logic has been long forgotten.
In addition, nothing any of the guests say is ever a personal conviction; if it has to do with someone at Gatsby's parties, it's always that this person They tells them everything the guests need to know especially when discussing who is pretending to be whose husband or wife. These almost interchangeable characters form a being that seems to be wrongly driving a wedge between Nick and Gatsby based on nationalistic propaganda.
As in The House of Mirth, a shrewd Jewish businessman seems to signify how not to attain wealth. Throughout the lunch, Wolfsheim treated Nick quite rudely by randomly switching his attention away from Nick and treating Nick with a degree of indignation. Even though Gatsby randomly abandons Nick to make a phone call as well, the way Gatsby pales in comparison to Wolfsheim's shrewdness shows the reader that Gatsby's disconcerting habits result from bad influences rather than character flaws. Moreover, Wolfsheim's anecdote about his friend who was gunned down at lunch foretells not only the tragic end to his way of life, but the tragic life itself. If even a relaxing lunch can be tainted by the quest for good business, there is little living to begin with. Wolfsheim represents a life completely consumed by the quest to build the "American Dream": financial success.
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