Jay Gatsby is the central, enigmatic focus of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. When the reader first meets Gatsby, it is through the description of Nick Carraway, who notes that his neighbor of the less fashionable (i.e. 'new money') area of West Egg, Long Island has purchased a palatial mansion. Every weekend, people in motor cars come to Gatsby's parties; every Monday, the staff cleans up the debris. No luxury is too great for Gatsby: "every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York… There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb" (Fitzgerald 3). The source of Gatsby's wealth is vague and gradually it emerges that he made his fortune as a bootlegger.

Gatsby tries to affect a...
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