Fitzgerald first hints at the importance of time to the narrative in chapter 2, when Nick attends a party at Tom’s flat in the city. This party seems to speed up as Nick gets drunker, making events like Tom’s breaking Myrtle’s nose and Nick’s stumbling drunk into the elevator appear to happen in rapid succession. Fitzgerald indicates that Nick lost time or blacked out with an ellipsis followed by a sentence that begins, “I was standing beside his bed” (where the bed belongs to Mr. McKee, a downstairs neighbor of Tom’s). It is unclear what happens in this ellipsis or why Nick was even in Mr. McKee’s room, but the end result is that time seems to lurch forward somehow, becoming more selective and less chronological as it goes.