“I'm Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

“I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host.”

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

This “irresistible prejudice in your favour”, this mixture of benevolence, generous spirit, understanding, seems to promise the possibility of intimate connection between Gatsby and Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel and recipient of this wonderful smile. This is the kindness we look for in intimacy. If we can be sure of that “quality of eternal reassurance”, we have just what we need to side with the Schlegel sisters' risk taking against Frank Bascombe's caution. In addition, where heightened emotion can become somewhat solipsistic, kindness is the counterbalancing force in achieving the mutualism of intimacy.

But can Nick trust that smile? Can we really know if all is as it seems? Gatsby appears to be the archetypal self-made man of the emergent modernist era, flickering in and out of focus throughout the novel. Is this smile an intimate one or a trick of the light? Is he making a promise or just being promising? By the end of the novel, Gatsby’s emptiness is revealed, but at the start he stands for hope and enabled hopefulness in others. For all the risk taking that comes from searching for intimacy we will miss our mark if we are not met with kindness in return, and thus risk shame or humiliation.