《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter IV》第3节
A man named Klipspringer was there so often that he became known as “the boarder”—I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Myer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square. Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names—Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be. In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
注释摘要
尼克在这里用了一种近乎人类学田野笔记的口气，把那个夏天去过盖茨比家的宾客一一罗列。这不是叙述，而是清点。名单上的每个人都被压缩成一个名字、一个标签、一个奇闻或者一个死法。这本身就是尼克的反讽——他说这些人名比他的概括更能说明问题，可实际上，他恰恰在用这种档案式的排列，来概括这群派对常客的本质：他们只是一群名字，一群来历不明、去向不祥、彼此毫无真正关联的人。…