The Great Gatsby - That damn elusive rhythm

Gatsby recounts to Carraway an evening five years previous which is then assimilated into his 3rd person narrative:

[Gatsby] talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...
...One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned towards each other...Then he kissed her.

This beautiful romantic reminiscence (not quoted here in full) is then succeeded by the narrator's mental battle to free some profound and incisive memory tantalizingly teased forth:

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable for ever. - p71

Again there may be allusions to Eliot's 'Prufrock' as he contemplates: 'Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,/ Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?'. It is perhaps a magnificent description of that irritating and frustrating sensation of feeling some recollection through indirect association which at the moment of conscious focus evaporates beyond comprehension. Then again, maybe it was nothing... somehow though, I don't think so.

The Great Gatsby - Carraway and Prufrock

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others - poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well. - pp.37-38 (Wordsworth Classics, 1993)

COMPARE:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

- 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock', T.S. Eliot,
- http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/eliot.html

It is interesting that Carraway then immediately turns to the topic of Jordan Baker, the famed golf champion and mild love interest though he does well to explicitly state: 'I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity'.