Gatsby is buried in a cemetery in or near West Egg. Its location is not identified specifically. When nobody comes to Gatsby's house for the funeral service, Nick asks the Lutheran minister to wait another thirty minutes; still when no one comes, about five o'clock the funeral party moves to the cemetery. Those attending include Nick, Gatsby's father, the minister, four or five servants, the West Egg postman, and Gatsby's former party guest, Owl Eyes. The brief graveside service is conducted in the rain.
Nick stays in West Egg for a couple of months after the funeral. Gatsby was murdered at the very end of summer; Nick explains when he decided to go back home:
. . . when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
Nick is in West Egg at the end of October. It is at this time that he runs into Tom Buchanan on Fifth Avenue in New York, an unpleasant experience for Nick who feels nothing by disgust for the Buchanans by this time. It is a little while after this encounter with Tom--winter has not set in yet--that Nick packs his trunk, sells his car, and goes home. It is two years later, while back in the Midwest, that Nick tells the story of Gatsby. Nick left the East, but he could not escape his memories of that summer in 1922.
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