Wolfshiem is the man who put Gatsby on his feet and where he is now. Wolfshiem is a man who reflects that he has seen a lot in his life. He wears the persona of a gangster much more openly than Gatsby. He shows this when he talks about his friends. He says, “Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside. ‘All right,’ says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I pulled him down in his chair…” (Fitzgerald 4). He openly talks about the death of one of his friends. Though he talks about his gangster experiences more obviously he is still afraid of how the media or how the outside world sees him. When Gatsby dies he is invited to his funeral by Nick, but he declines. When saying no he says, “When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different—if a friend of mine died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that’s sentimental, but I mean it—to the bitter end” (Fitzgerald 9). He says this because he is afraid of being caught up and being seen by people. So even so Wolfshiem is much more open about what he does he still is someone who can’t do anything about the media and what they say. Wolfshiem and Gatsby are gangsters that act in different ways but are still subject to the world.
