Gatsby’s house is filled with lights, music, and strangers every Saturday night. His parties are legendary: orchestras play, champagne flows freely, and celebrities mingle with nobodies under the false belief of belonging. For all their pomp, however, Gatsby’s parties are hollow, ostentatious displays compensating for stark loneliness. Fitzgerald uses such incidents in order to recall the spirit of the 1920s, a decade of postwar prosperity, wild abandon, and shifting morals. Friends arrive uninvited and leave unasked. No one actually knows who Gatsby is and fewer still bother to find out. The parties serve only one purpose: to entice Daisy. Gatsby goes to them for no other purpose than himself. He watches, waits, and hopes. The parties are all enticements, symbolizing his hope of re-creation of the past in spectacle form. Gatsby hopes to impress Daisy when she is finally around, but she finds them boorish and overwhelming instead. The moment Gatsby’s illusion is broken, the parties vanish. No one returns. The house grows dark. This fleeting emptiness is a metaphor for the shallowness of the social existence and the fleeting nature of Gatsby’s fame. Fitzgerald satirizes a performative culture, where business is in the relationship and semblance over reality. Gatsby’s parties, with their dazzle, are fantasies. They expose how readily happiness can be faked, how closeness can be mimicked, and how ambition, divorced from reality, can be an empty pageant.