At the onset, The Great Gatsby is essentially more mystery than social drama and critique. The reader is required to work their way through Nick’s evaluation of the mysterious figure who is throwing lavish parties in West Egg.This falls into the parameters for reader response that Cullen outlines. Whereby the reader analyzes the gap in knowledge that the narrator, Nick, presents regarding Gatsby. Further, In “‘A Fragment of Lost Words’: Narrative Ellipses in The Great Gatsby,” author Matthew J. Bolton highlights how this narrative technique allows for mystery and further leaves work on the hands of the reader. Bolton writes:
As a great short novel, The Great Gatsby gathers force and power not only from what it says, but also from what it chooses not to say. Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald's enigmatic narrator, relates Jay Gatsby’s story in a manner that is at once concise and elliptical. These two qualities are not at odds with each other; in fact, the more concise one is, the more one must leave out. Such narrative elisions - the places in the text where Nick omits important information or jumps over some event in Gatsby’s life or his own - might draw the reader’s attention to the process of selection that is at work in the novel as a whole” (Bolton 190)
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Could the symbol of the eyes then also reflect the experience of the reader of this text. Again, the reader looking into the experience of these characters, the “sentimentalism” of Daisy that destroys Gatsby, as Burman notes, and seeing their own feelings for sentimentalism and an “order” life reflected (Burnam ). It is almost a reverse psychology which leads the reader towards seeing their own-selves in the text, such as Iser argues, while also leaving room for an additional intentional meaning on the part of the