The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, no consciousness of being so

Could you please tell me what the narrator means by "being so" in the following excerpt from The Great Gatsby in the chapter Five?

There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

Thank you.

Asked by
Last updated by jill d #170087
Answers 3
Add Yours
Best Answer

.....no realization of the independent and advantageous lives they lived in the Egg. The West Egg's populace was unaware of how special the place they lived in really was.

no realization

no realization of what?