Sharp contrasts stress social cleavage in an apparent paradise. Most noticeably, Fitzgerald’s spatial rhetoric customarily pushes the lower orders down and out, while the privileged sort roam practically anywhere in any shape. Also underscoring separations are the language levels among the speeches. Drab talk is abbreviated utterance typified by repetition of monosyllables, contractions, and careless stops and endings: A street-orator presses his mob-audience to consider, “What have you got outa the war? . . . Look arounja, look arounja! Are you rich?”; Rose says loosely of Himmel, “He’s sittin’ lookin’”; Key thickly proclaims, “We gotta get another li’l bottle. . . . ”; the police captain belongs to this order, too, as he shows by pleading, “Here now! This is no way! One of your own sojers got shoved out the back window an’ killed hisself!”

These habits join in a brotherhood of sloppy speech some of the elements of revolution, ironically set against themselves. Even Himmel, lowered by alcohol, can sound drab: “A fight?—tha’s stuff . . . Fight ’em all.” Upstairs in Delmonico’s, however, Himmel sets himself above the drab by a mocking interrogation: “May I ask why you gentlemen prefer to lounge away your leisure hours in a room which is chiefly furnished, as far as I can see, with scrubbing brushes,” going on from that to a parody of how “the human race has progressed.” In contrast to this rhetoric, Henry Bradin, the privileged person most concerned with human progress, sounds casual, a fact that supports the idea that he is the best hope for communication across the gaps.

Repeated imagery also teases together what cannot yet stay joined. A series of attempted embraces shows Peter’s clumsiness, Gordon’s spasmodic clutchings, and Jewel’s taking command, with sudden grace, of a love she can hold only briefly, until his weakness reduces their marriage to a one-night stand.

Perhaps the most effective preparation for ironic cleavage is the exuberant fabular style of the beginning. New York appears to be the great city, of any realm, where all the ranks triumphantly celebrate in a vast materialistic binge, accompanied by bands. However, merchants from the outlands capture the furs, the varicolored slippers, and the bags of golden mesh, leaving little for ordinary folk to buy in celebration. The bag that Jewel Hudson carries measures her distance from acceptance by identifying her acceptance of a substitute: It is mesh, plain mesh, and she takes from it a dollar and bribes the drab waiter Key to bring her lover Gordon down to her.