The Great Gatsby
Owl Eyes
The man in the library
A tipsy party guest in huge round glasses who is amazed to discover that Gatsby’s books are real.
Owl Eyes is a guest at Gatsby’s party whom Nick and Jordan find in Gatsby’s library, drunk and delighted. He is astonished that the books are real, with actual pages, not cardboard stage props. He is eccentric and sharp, and the adaptation draws him with enormous round spectacles.
He sees something nobody else does: that Gatsby has gone to enormous trouble to make a world that looks real. He later turns up outside the gates, where a car has lost a wheel in a ditch.
“They’re real. Absolute real pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard.”
In the story
Contains spoilers.
Owl Eyes is the only party guest who comes to Gatsby’s funeral. He stands in the rain with Nick and Henry Gatz at the graveside, and afterward he says that Gatsby was a poor son of a bitch, words that stay with Nick.
Everyone else who ate and drank at Gatsby’s expense stays away, which makes the drunk man in the thick glasses the nearest thing the dead man has to a guest of honor.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
