p. 91:
Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.
This sounds like a description of a man at a funeral, rather than a man on the doorstep to a reunion with his lost love. Fitzgerald never describes what Gatsby is thinking or feeling, but instead describes his trembling hands, distraught eyes, the tense bearing of his ‘strained counterfeit of perfect ease.’ The economy of writing here paints a lush landscape of emotion with spare strokes of perfect detail. The thoughts that are not described imbue the scene with their heavy absence.
