“[New York], like Daisy, has in it a promise, a mirage that when reached becomes debased and corrupted. The city is the link between Gatsby’s dream [i.e. the fantasy self he seeks to become] and the American dream. The dream is not about money but what he imagines he can become. It is not a comment on America as a materialistic country but as an idealistic one, one that has turned money into a means of retrieving a dream. There is nothing crass here, or the crassness is so mingled with the dream that it becomes very difficult to differentiate between the two.”

–Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran