Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner bondsman, rents a cottage in West Egg next to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. Drawn into the world of his cousin Daisy and her brutish husband Tom, Nick becomes the confidant for Gatsby's singular, five-year obsession: to win back Daisy and recreate a perfect past, a dream that ultimately collides with reality and ends in violence.
The morning of the funeral, Nick goes to New York to see Wolfshiem. He finds an office marked “The Swastika Holding Company.” A hostile woman insists Wolfshiem is in Chicago, though Nick hears someone whistling behind a partition. When he mentions Gatsby, she relents. Wolfshiem appears, solemn, holding out both hands. He speaks reverently of finding Gatsby as a young major just out of the army, wearing his uniform because he had no other clothes, having not eaten for days. “I raised him up out of nothing,” Wolfshiem declares. But when Nick asks him to the funeral, the gangster’s nostrils quiver. “I can’t get mixed up in it,” he insists. “When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
The funeral proceeds in a thick drizzle. The procession is three cars: a black hearse, a limousine with Mr. Gatz, the minister, and Nick, and a station wagon with servants and the postman, all soaked. As they enter the cemetery, Nick hears splashing behind them. It is the owl-eyed man from Gatsby’s library, the stranger who once marveled that all the books were real. Rain pours down his thick glasses; he removes and wipes them. “I couldn’t get to the house,” he remarks. “Neither could anybody else.” He pauses, then murmurs, “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,” and the owl-eyed man says “Amen to that,” in a brave voice. He takes off his glasses and wipes them again. “Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.” He looks at the grave. “The poor son-of-a-bitch,” he says, offering the only genuine tribute the dead man receives.
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