Every reader of The Great Gatsby remembers the green light and the shirts and the ash-grey men of the valley. Fewer remember the man at the piano. He appears twice in the whole novel, once at a keyboard and once on a telephone, and both times he is an interruption. Gatsby has to go and fetch him. Nick has to hang up on him. This study makes one claim about him and keeps it in view from the first paragraph to the last: Klipspringer is the guest who wanted his shoes back. Everything else Fitzgerald tells us about him, the piano playing, the residence that is not quite a residence, the missed funeral, is evidence for that sentence, and the sentence is the coldest joke in the book.

The complication is that criticism has mostly treated him as a throwaway, a bit of comic business to fill the gloom of the reunion scene and then to sharpen the pathos of the funeral chapter. That reading mistakes the joke for decoration. Fitzgerald does not waste minor figures. The man who will not come to a funeral but will telephone about footwear is not local color. He is the parasitic crowd of the parties condensed into a single body, given a name, a pair of shell-rimmed glasses, and a permanent address that is not his own. Where the crowd is a blur of faces, Klipspringer is one face, and one face can be indicted.

What follows is a reading of the two scenes that contain him, the Chapter 5 piano performance and the Chapter 9 telephone call, with the connective tissue between them: the arrangement by which a grown man comes to live, rent free and chore free, in another man’s mansion. The method is simple. Stay close to what Nick actually reports. Notice what Klipspringer takes and what he gives, in a ledger the novel never lets balance. Set him beside Owl Eyes, the one party guest who does come back, and watch the difference do the moral work. And resist the temptation to treat him as merely funny, because the funniness is the mechanism by which Fitzgerald makes ingratitude legible.

The pages that follow keep one sentence in view: he is the guest who wanted his shoes back. It is worth saying what the sentence does not claim. It does not claim Klipspringer is evil; he is too small for evil, which requires a grandeur of intention he never approaches, a deliberateness his whole character is organized to avoid. It does not claim he is the novel’s villain; the novel’s villains have names like Buchanan and work at larger scales of damage, with cars and money and the impunity of class. It claims something more precise and more useful: that in a book crowded with people who take, Daisy taking devotion, Tom taking impunity, Wolfshiem taking profit, the party guests taking an evening, he is the one who takes without disguise and without interval, and the lack of disguise makes him the clearest lens the book offers on its world. To read him rightly is to read the novel rightly, because he is the one figure in whom its moral arithmetic shows without remainder.

The Piano in the Rain

The scene is the afternoon of the reunion, after the rain has stopped and Gatsby is showing Daisy through his house. Nick has just watched Daisy weep over the shirts, has just heard Gatsby tell her about the green light, has just begun to understand that five years of longing are colliding with a real woman in a real room. The tour reaches the music room. Gatsby disappears for a few minutes and comes back calling “Ewing!”, and behind him comes the novel’s fullest description of the man: an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with shell-rimmed glasses and scant blond hair, decently clothed in a sport shirt open at the neck, sneakers, and duck trousers of a nebulous hue. Every detail of that costume matters. The glasses suggest a reader who never reads. The sport shirt, open at the neck, is leisure wear worn by a man whose whole life is leisure. The duck trousers are a costume of yachting country, the uniform of a class Klipspringer borrows without buying. And the sneakers are the first appearance of the shoes that will end the novel’s account of him. Fitzgerald plants footwear in the first scene and harvests it in the last.

The summoning itself deserves a pause, because it is the most revealing stage direction in the scene. Gatsby does not ring for Klipspringer. He does not send a servant. He goes out of the room calling “Ewing!” and returns minutes later with the man in tow, which means he went upstairs, or down the hall, to wherever the boarder keeps himself, and fetched him the way a man fetches a houseguest for dinner. The informality is the data. In a house with a staff, with a butler who could have been dispatched, Gatsby performs the errand himself, and the errand tells us the boarder is not remote enough to require a servant’s summons nor close enough to already be in the room. He exists in the middle distance of the household, near enough to be called, far enough to need calling. That middle distance is his exact social position: too present to be a guest, too useless to be staff, occupying a category the house invented for him and that the novel names with those quiet quotation marks, “the boarder.”

What happens next is a small masterpiece of social awkwardness. Gatsby has fetched his boarder to provide music for the most important afternoon of his life, and the boarder does not want to play. “I don’t play well,” he protests. “I don’t, I hardly play at all. I’m all out of practice.” He plays “The Love Nest” anyway, turns around on the bench, searches unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom, and protests again: “I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play.” Then Gatsby, who has spent the entire afternoon trembling with the effort of making everything perfect, drops the courtship voice entirely and issues an order: “Don’t talk so much, old sport. Play!” The “old sport” is the giveaway. It is Gatsby’s universal solvent of address, the phrase he pours over everyone from Nick to a police officer, and here it lands on a man being told to stop talking and work. The command exposes the actual economy of the house. Klipspringer is not a guest being entertained. He is staff being put to use, staff who has forgotten he is staff because the house has never asked anything of him before.

The song Gatsby orders is “Ain’t We Got Fun,” and the lyrics, as Nick transcribes them, do a kind of work no other song in the scene could do. “In the morning, in the evening, ain’t we got fun.” Then the second verse, the one that bites: “One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer, the rich get richer and the poor get children. In the meantime, in between time.” Consider the situation. A man who owns nothing is singing, to a man who owns everything, a jaunty vaudeville number about the rich getting richer. The poor in the song get children. Klipspringer, who is poor in everything except appetite, gets room and board. The irony is not delicate, and Fitzgerald does not need it to be, because the scene is already doing something more painful: while the boarder plunks out a tune about fun, Gatsby and Daisy are having the most serious ten minutes of their lives a few feet away in the gloom, and neither of them is listening to him. He is the soundtrack to a reunion that has no use for him. Nick, understanding this before anyone else does, goes over to say goodbye and walks out into the rain, leaving them there together.

The worked reading of this passage has to linger on one more detail, because it is the detail that makes the scene a character study rather than a set piece. Klipspringer protests that he is out of practice, and he is telling the truth. His playing is mediocre. Fitzgerald could have given Gatsby a brilliant amateur, a real musician among the hangers on, and the scene would have been prettier. Instead he gives us a man whose one marketable skill is exercised badly, on demand, in a room where nobody is listening. That is the whole of Klipspringer in one image: a man consuming the hospitality of a house whose emotional life happens entirely without him. He is present at the central scene of the novel’s love story the way furniture is present. The difference between him and the furniture is that the furniture does not complain about being out of practice.

There is a repair worth making here, because readers routinely misremember the scene. The common misreading goes like this: Klipspringer is a party musician, a hired hand, part of the entertainment apparatus of the house. The text will not support it. Nobody hired him. He lives there. Gatsby does not send for the band; he goes upstairs and calls “Ewing!” the way a man calls a houseguest down to dinner. The distinction changes everything about the passage. A hired musician playing badly is a detail about Gatsby’s taste. A resident playing badly, fetched in his sneakers, is a detail about Gatsby’s household, about the strange domestic economy in which the richest house in West Egg keeps one permanent guest who contributes nothing and is summoned like a servant only when music is wanted. Before the reunion scene, Klipspringer is a rumor of a boarder. After it, he is a fact of the house.

The chapter that holds this scene can be revisited in the Chapter 5 reunion reading, where the piano performance sits inside the larger choreography of the afternoon, but the point for this study is narrower. Fitzgerald introduces Klipspringer at the piano so that we will remember the piano when the telephone rings four chapters later. The instrument and the call are the two poles of the character, and the wire between them is the pair of shoes.

Why does the Chapter 5 piano scene need Klipspringer instead of any other musician?

The scene needs a resident, not a performer. Only a man who lives in the house can be fetched in minutes, in sneakers, in the middle of a private afternoon. A hired musician would turn the moment into a concert; Klipspringer turns it into a household accident, and the accident is the point.

Gatsby’s grandest romantic gesture is scored by a mediocre boarder who would rather not be playing, which tells us exactly how much of Gatsby’s dream depends on other people, and how little those people understand the weight they are asked to carry.

That is the first half of the ledger, and it is worth stating plainly before the second half arrives. In Chapter 5, Klipspringer gives Gatsby music, reluctantly, badly, and on command. It is the single largest contribution he will ever make to the household, and it happens while the two people it is meant to serve are too absorbed in each other to hear it. Everything after this is subtraction.

The Boarder Who All But Lives There

Nick introduces the arrangement in a single sentence that does more work than most paragraphs in the novel: a man named Klipspringer was at Gatsby’s so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder,” and Nick doubts he had any other home. Read it slowly, because Fitzgerald packed the whole character into the grammar. “Was there so often and so long” is duration without event; nothing happens in that clause, which is exactly the point, because nothing about Klipspringer’s residence is eventful. He did not arrive. He accumulated. “Became known as ‘the boarder’” is a title conferred by the household’s gossip rather than by any agreement, and the quotation marks around it are Nick’s quiet signal that the word is doing ironic work. A boarder, in the ordinary sense, is a lodger who pays for room and board. Klipspringer pays for nothing. The title is accurate the way a nickname is accurate: it describes the shape of the thing while inverting its substance. He boards in the sense that a ship takes on cargo. “I doubt if he had any other home” is the sentence’s closing door. It converts a comic figure into a slightly desolate one, a man whose entire existence has been absorbed by another man’s house, and it does so without a flicker of sentimentality, because Nick is not asking us to pity Klipspringer. He is asking us to see him.

The arrangement raises a question the novel never answers and never needs to answer: how did this begin? There is no scene of invitation, no backstory of friendship, no explanation of what Klipspringer does with his days. Fitzgerald’s refusal to supply an origin is itself the characterization. For Daisy there is Louisville and a white dress. For Gatsby there is North Dakota and Dan Cody. For Klipspringer there is a pair of sneakers and a piano bench, and the blank where a past should be is the point. He is not a person with a history who happens to be freeloading. He is freeloading with a person attached, or rather with a person-shaped vacancy attached. The novel populates Gatsby’s parties with figures who have this same blankness, the man with the owl-eyed spectacles, the girl who tears her dress, the film director and his star, and Klipspringer is their permanent delegate, the one who stayed when the catering trucks left.

Consider what the house must have been like with him in it on ordinary days, the days between parties when the narrative is elsewhere. Gatsby’s mansion is a stage set that is only fully lit on weekends. On a Tuesday afternoon it is a very large, very quiet building full of rooms nobody uses, staffed by servants maintaining a splendor with no audience. Into that quiet, Klipspringer fits like a draft under a door. He is the only person in the house besides the servants who is there without being paid to be there, which makes him, paradoxically, the closest thing the house has to a family member. The servants keep the house running. Gatsby keeps the house dreaming. Klipspringer keeps the house inhabited. That is his function, and it is worth taking seriously for a paragraph before the moral judgment lands, because Gatsby gets something real from the arrangement even if he never articulates it.

What does Gatsby get from Klipspringer that the party crowd cannot give him?

Gatsby gets a house that feels lived in rather than exhibited, and that distinction matters to a man whose entire project is turning a building into a home Daisy might enter. The party crowd arrives in hundreds and leaves tire tracks. Klipspringer stays.

That staying means the mansion has a witness on weekdays, a body in a bedroom, a pair of sneakers by a door. He also gets music on demand, the one practical service in the arrangement, exercised in Chapter 5. What he does not get, and never asks for, is loyalty, gratitude, or attention, and the fact that he never asks is part of the tragedy: Gatsby has priced his household’s affection at zero and is surprised, at the end, by the invoice.

The deeper question is why Gatsby tolerates, even sustains, a man who so plainly gives nothing back, and the answer runs through the central wound of the character. Gatsby is a man who bought his way into a world and remains terrified that the world will notice he does not belong. A house full of guests is evidence of belonging. A house with a permanent guest is better evidence. Klipspringer, by simply continuing to be there, performs the most valuable service in Gatsby’s economy: he treats the mansion as a home, casually, the way a man treats a place he has every right to be. Every morning Klipspringer comes downstairs in his sport shirt is a morning the house passes as a real house rather than a set. Gatsby cannot buy that performance. He can only host it, and the price of hosting it is everything Klipspringer consumes.

There is a second, sadder layer. Gatsby’s great talent is hope, and his great defect is that he extends it indiscriminately. He hopes Daisy will come back. He hopes the parties will produce the right guest. He hopes, in some unexamined corner, that the people who eat his food will love him for it. Klipspringer is the test case that proves the defect. Nobody could mistake Klipspringer for a friend, and yet Gatsby keeps him, feeds him, and finally fetches him to play the piano for the woman Gatsby loves. The standard misreading says Gatsby is a fool for keeping such a man. The better reading says Gatsby cannot distinguish between being used and being loved, because no one in his adult life has ever loved him without using him, and he has mistaken the constant presence of a user for the thing he actually wants. Daisy uses him and leaves. Klipspringer uses him and stays. From inside Gatsby’s hope, staying looks like the better deal.

Where does Klipspringer go when the parties end?

Nowhere, and that single word is the whole of his menace and his comedy. The party crowd has somewhere to be on Monday: offices, apartments, other people’s houses in Greenwich. Klipspringer has the house. When the last car crunches down the drive, he is still upstairs.

Or at the piano, or asleep in the room that is not his but might as well be. The novel never shows us this, which is why the question matters: Fitzgerald leaves the weekday Klipspringer entirely to our inference, and the inference is damning. A man who is only ever seen at leisure, in a house that is only ever his by tolerance, has made tolerance into a career. The parties end for everyone except the one man who never needed them to begin with, because he had already converted the party into a residence.

This is where the study must keep its promise to distinguish Klipspringer from the hangers on as a group, because the distinction is the difference between a symptom and a diagnosis. The party guests are episodic parasites. They arrive, consume, and depart, and their departures are part of the social contract of the party: everyone understands that the fun is rented. Klipspringer has broken the contract by refusing the departure. He is a chronic parasite, a man who took the temporary arrangement of the party and stretched it across months until it became a life. The group study of the hangers on maps a crowd. This study maps the one man who realized the crowd’s logic could be made permanent, and in that realization he becomes more revealing than the crowd, because he shows what the crowd would be if it never had to go home.

The novel never shows us Klipspringer’s weekdays, but the evidence lets us assemble one, and the assembly is worth doing because it makes the abstraction concrete. Picture a Tuesday in June. The parties are four days past and three days off. The servants are at work: the caterers’ crates cleared, the silver polished, the lawns cut into the shape of hospitality. Gatsby is in the city, or in his study, or standing at the window looking across the water. And Klipspringer comes downstairs late, in the sport shirt, and eats breakfast that someone else cooked, in a dining room built for forty, and then does what? The novel gives us no answer because there is no answer. Perhaps he plays the piano, badly, for no one. Perhaps he reads the paper. Perhaps he naps. The point of the vignette is its emptiness: a whole day, in the finest house in West Egg, with nothing in it. That nothing is what Gatsby is paying for. Every other resident of the house has a function. The servants maintain. Gatsby dreams. Klipspringer occupies. Occupation is his profession, and he practices it the way other men practice law, daily and without reflection. The guest who wanted his shoes back is, on this Tuesday, simply the guest, being a guest so completely that the word loses its meaning.

The Phone Call About the Shoes

Chapter 9 opens with Nick alone in Gatsby’s house, making the funeral arrangements because no one else will, and the telephone becomes the chapter’s instrument of moral accounting. Nick calls and calls. Daisy and Tom have left without a forwarding address. Wolfshiem will not come. The party guests have evaporated. Then, in the evening, the telephone rings, and the caller is Klipspringer, and for one sentence Nick permits himself hope. The caller demands to know who is speaking before he will give his name, which is already a small portrait: the frightened, self-protective etiquette of a man who has been living on other people’s tolerance and knows it. When Nick identifies himself, the voice on the line says, with relief, “This is Klipspringer.” And Nick, who has spent two days discovering how alone he is on Gatsby’s side, writes the sentence that makes the rest of the passage hurt: he was relieved too, for that seemed to promise another friend at Gatsby’s grave.

Hold that sentence. It is the hinge of the whole character. Nick’s relief is genuine and reasonable. Here, at last, is someone who lived in the house, someone who must have known Gatsby better than the party crowd did, someone with every reason to come. The relief lasts for exactly four exchanges. Nick gives the details: the funeral is tomorrow, three o’clock, at the house, and would Klipspringer tell anybody who might be interested. “Oh, I will,” Klipspringer breaks out hastily. “Of course I’m not likely to see anybody, but if I do.” Read that reply as a piece of comic writing and it is flawless. The haste of “Oh, I will” collides with the immediate retraction of “of course I’m not likely to see anybody,” and the conditional “but if I do” dangles off the end like a man waving goodbye while running away. In two clauses Klipspringer volunteers for a duty and disqualifies himself from it. Nick hears it. “His tone made me suspicious,” he writes, and then, with the bluntness of a man past politeness: “Of course you’ll be there yourself.”

What follows is the great excuse, and it deserves a worked reading because its construction is the character’s autobiography. “Well, I’ll certainly try.” The “certainly” is doing heavy lifting for a sentence that means maybe. “What I called up about is,” he begins, and then Nick interrupts, because Nick has heard this music before: “Wait a minute. How about saying you’ll come?” It is the only moment in the novel where Nick speaks to a hanger on with open impatience, and the impatience is earned twice over, once by grief and once by the recognition that he is being managed. Klipspringer, pressed, produces the excuse in full: “Well, the fact is, the truth of the matter is that I’m staying with some people up here in Greenwich, and they rather expect me to be with them tomorrow. In fact, there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of course I’ll do my very best to get away.”

Every phrase in that excuse is worth weighing. “The fact is, the truth of the matter is” is the doubled throat clearing of a man who has no facts and knows it; people who have a real reason say the reason. “Some people up here in Greenwich” is geography as fog: Greenwich is close enough to be plausible and vague enough to be unverifiable, and “some people” is the same blank where a name should be that has characterized Klipspringer from the start. “They rather expect me to be with them tomorrow” converts a weak social obligation into a chain, as if the expectations of unnamed people in Greenwich outweigh the funeral of the man who housed him for months. “There’s a sort of picnic or something” is the masterpiece, the “or something” dissolving the picnic into pure hypothesis even as he cites it as a barrier. And “of course I’ll do my very best to get away” is the promise that promises nothing, “very best” doing the same work as the earlier “certainly.” The whole speech is a machine for converting “I don’t want to come” into “circumstances prevent me,” and the machine is so transparent that Nick can see through it while it is still running. “I ejaculated an unrestrained ‘Huh!’” he writes, and the “Huh!” is the most honest syllable in the chapter.

Then comes the pivot, and the pivot is why the passage is remembered when the rest of the chapter’s disappointments blur. “What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if it’d be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You see, they’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them. My address is care of B. F.” The sentence “What I called up about was” retroactively reclassifies the entire conversation. He did not call about the funeral. He called about footwear. The condolence call was the pretext; the logistics of the shoes were the purpose. The request itself is a small marvel of presumption: not “may I come and collect them,” which would at least bring his body back to the house, but “have the butler send them on,” which keeps his body in Greenwich and puts the dead man’s servant to work for the living boarder. The butler, who has just finished serving a household whose master is dead, is to become a shipping clerk for tennis shoes.

And then the line that the novel will not let go of: “You see, they’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them.” The “you see” is the confidential nudge of a man who assumes his listener shares his scale of values, as if Nick will naturally understand that tennis shoes constitute an emergency. “Sort of helpless” is the precise register of the chronic dependent: not helpless, which would be a crisis, but “sort of” helpless, which is a lifestyle. A man who is sort of helpless without his tennis shoes is a man who has organized his entire existence around other people solving his small problems, and the comedy of the line is that he says it to a man occupied with the enormous problem of burying his host. Nick does not answer. “I didn’t hear the rest of the name,” he writes, “because I hung up the receiver.” The receiver going down is the chapter’s only satisfying sound.

The worked reading has to close the circuit back to Chapter 5, because Fitzgerald closed it and the reader who misses the closure misses the design. When Gatsby fetched Klipspringer for the piano, the boarder arrived in sneakers. When Klipspringer calls from Greenwich, he wants his tennis shoes sent on. The novel does not say these are the same shoes, and it does not need to. The rhyme is enough: the man entered the narrative in soft shoes and exits it asking for soft shoes, and in between he never once wore anything that suggests he stood on his own feet. Footwear in the novel is a quiet motif of readiness and class, from Gatsby’s patent leather shoes to the white shoes of the party girls, and Klipspringer’s shoes are the motif’s comic nadir: the only footwear in the book that matters because its owner cannot function without it. Before this passage, a reader could have filed Klipspringer under local color. After it, he is the novel’s final exhibit in the case against the parasitic life, because he is the only parasite who calls back, and what he calls back about is himself.

The funeral chapter as a whole stages this accounting, and the Chapter 9 funeral reading places the call among the chapter’s other absences, but the call deserves isolation because it is structurally different from every other absence. Daisy and Tom are gone without a trace; their absence is a fact Nick discovers. Wolfshiem refuses with a letter full of feeling; his absence is a choice dressed as grief. The party crowd simply never materializes; their absence is the weather. Klipspringer alone makes his absence into a telephone call, which means he alone forces Nick, and the reader, to experience the ingratitude as a live event rather than a discovered condition. The others are gone. Klipspringer is present and useless, which is worse, and Fitzgerald knew it was worse, which is why he gave the scene dialogue instead of narration. This is the guest who wanted his shoes back at the height of his powers: not ignoring the funeral, which anyone can do, but converting the machinery of condolence into a delivery service, and doing it in a voice so ordinary that the ordinariness becomes the horror.

Why does the Chapter 9 phone call land harder than the empty funeral?

The empty funeral is an absence, and absences have to be inferred. The phone call is a presence with the wrong contents, and that is harder to look away from. A reader can understand that hundreds of party guests will not come; it is sociology.

But one specific voice, relieved to hear Nick, promising to try, citing a picnic, and then asking about shoes, is a person choosing, in real time, to be small. The funeral indicts the crowd. The call indicts the individual, and the individual is the unit the novel finally cares about, because crowds do not have souls and Klipspringer, to Fitzgerald’s horror and ours, does.

There is a before and after repair that belongs here, because this passage is routinely misread in a way that softens it. The misreading says Klipspringer is merely comic relief, a breather between the grim business of the funeral arrangements, and that Nick hangs up in exasperation the way anyone would end an awkward call. The repair starts by noticing what Nick actually felt first: relief. He was relieved. That relief is the passage’s emotional truth, because it measures the exact size of the hope Gatsby’s world still allowed, one friend at the grave, and then the passage measures the exact size of the disappointment. To call it comic relief is to miss that the comedy is the vehicle and the grief is the cargo. The laugh the passage produces is the laugh of recognition, the sound a reader makes when a character does the embarrassingly human thing of caring more about his shoes than his host’s funeral, and then the laugh stops, because Nick has hung up, and the silence after the click is the sound of the novel’s judgment.

What Klipspringer Takes and What He Gives

The novel never shows the transaction directly, which is why it helps to lay it out as a ledger. Every relationship in the book can be reduced to takes and gives, and the reduction is not cynical but clarifying: Fitzgerald’s people are always exchanging something, and the exchange always reveals the moral weight of the parties. Daisy takes devotion and gives a voice full of money. Tom takes impunity and gives bruises. Wolfshiem takes profit and gives cufflinks. Klipspringer’s ledger is the starkest in the book because one side of it is so full and the other so nearly empty that the imbalance becomes the character.

What Klipspringer takes from Gatsby	What Klipspringer gives Gatsby
A bedroom, for months, without rent or arrangement	One piano performance, reluctant and mediocre
Food, liquor, and the run of the finest house in West Egg	Music on demand, exactly once, when fetched in person
The status of a resident, the casual belonging Gatsby cannot buy	The appearance of a lived-in house on weekdays
Gatsby’s name as his effective address, “the boarder”	A laugh in Chapter 5 that curdles by Chapter 9
The butler’s labor, requested by telephone after the death	Nothing at the funeral, not even his body
The tennis shoes, to be mailed to Greenwich at the household’s trouble	The sentence “I’m sort of helpless without them,” offered as his whole eulogy

Read the table from top to bottom and it tells the story of the character in miniature. The takes are concrete, cumulative, and domestic: shelter, food, drink, status, labor. The gives are thin, and they thin out as you descend. The piano performance is real, if bad. The lived-in appearance is real, if accidental. By the bottom rows there is nothing left but absence and a sentence about shoes. The table ends where the novel ends its account of him, on the telephone call, because the call is the final entry and it belongs on the takes side: even after death, even after the household has dissolved, Klipspringer is still drawing on the account.

The asymmetry is worth sitting with, because it is easy to file under “freeloader” and move on, and filing it away misses what Fitzgerald is doing with the imbalance. The novel is full of imbalanced ledgers. Gatsby gives Daisy everything and gets a phone call that never comes. Nick gives Gatsby loyalty and gets a friendship that was always partly instrumental. What makes Klipspringer’s ledger different is not the imbalance but the shamelessness, the total absence of even the performance of reciprocity. Daisy at least weeps over the shirts. Wolfshiem at least writes a letter with feeling in it. Tom at least shows up at the end with his “sharp” grief. Klipspringer does not perform gratitude, does not feign sorrow, does not even pretend the funeral is a priority he must regretfully miss. He simply routes around it, the way water routes around a stone, toward the shoes. The shamelessness is the point. Fitzgerald is showing us what the parasitic life looks like when it stops bothering to disguise itself, and it looks like a man asking a grieving household to mail him his tennis shoes.

A reader doing the work of this study should try a concrete exercise with the table. Take any other minor figure in the novel and build the same two columns. Owl Eyes: takes liquor and a good story, gives wonder at the real books and, finally, his presence at the grave. The city tradesman who comes to the funeral: takes nothing we see, gives the mysterious devotion of a stranger. Even the man who got “what he deserved” according to the sneering caller takes Gatsby’s liquor and gives, at least, an honest opinion. Only Klipspringer’s gives column collapses to zero, and the collapse is instructive: it shows that the novel’s moral scale is not about how much you take, because everyone takes, but about whether you register the taking. The ledger is not an accounting of goods. It is an accounting of awareness, and Klipspringer’s awareness never rises above his footwear.

One more entry belongs on the takes side, though it is the subtlest and the easiest to miss. Klipspringer takes Gatsby’s death itself as a convenience. Consider the timing of the call. He telephones after the murder, when the house is in chaos, when Nick is alone and desperate for help, and he uses that moment, the moment of maximum vulnerability, to extract the shoes. He does not wait a week. He does not write a note. He calls while the body is barely cold, and the call’s real message, underneath the hedging and the picnic, is that Gatsby’s death has finally created the administrative opening to get the shoes sent. Death, for Klipspringer, is not a loss. It is a change of management, and he is calling the new management about his property. That is the final take, and it is the one that makes the ledger not just imbalanced but obscene.

The butler deserves a line of his own in this accounting, because he is the ledger’s silent witness. He is the man who ran Gatsby’s household, who served the parties and the quiet days alike, and in the novel’s final days he is the one still answering the telephone in a dead man’s house. Klipspringer’s request conscripts him: “have the butler send them on.” The butler, who has just finished laying out the machinery of a funeral, is to become a shipping clerk for tennis shoes. Fitzgerald does not show us the butler receiving this instruction, and the omission is merciful, but the reader can supply the scene. A professional servant, trained to efface himself, being asked to efface his master’s death in favor of a boarder’s footwear. The request tells us what Klipspringer thinks a household is: a machine for serving him, whose purpose survives the death of its owner. The machine, of course, disagrees. Nick hangs up, and the butler is spared. But the fact that the request was made, that it could be made, is the ledger’s final entry on the takes side, and it is written in someone else’s labor.

Klipspringer and Owl Eyes

The novel gives its party crowd two faces that it bothers to bring back, and the pairing is deliberate. Owl Eyes, the stout, middle-aged man with the enormous spectacles, appears first in the library, drunk and marveling that Gatsby’s books are real, with pages and everything. He reappears at the end, at the funeral, taking off his glasses to wipe them and calling Gatsby “the poor son of a bitch.” Klipspringer appears at the piano and on the telephone, and does not appear at the funeral at all. Fitzgerald has constructed a controlled experiment: two men, both beneficiaries of Gatsby’s hospitality, both comic, both marginal, placed at opposite ends of the novel’s moral action. One comes back. One calls about shoes. The comparison is the novel’s way of defining, by contrast, exactly what Klipspringer is.

Start with what they share, because the shared ground makes the divergence meaningful. Both men are takers. Owl Eyes drinks Gatsby’s liquor until he cannot see straight and crashes his car leaving a party. Klipspringer lives in Gatsby’s house for months. Both are comic figures, sources of the novel’s rare laughter. Both are seen by Nick with a mixture of amusement and something softer, curiosity in one case and, briefly, hope in the other. And both are defined by a single organ of perception: Owl Eyes by his eyes, which see the wonder of the real books, and Klipspringer by his hands, which play the piano badly, and by his feet, which need the tennis shoes. Fitzgerald loves this kind of physical shorthand, and he uses it to sort his crowd into those who perceive and those who merely consume.

The divergence is total. Owl Eyes perceives. His drunken wonder in the library is the novel’s great image of genuine response: a man who came for free liquor and found himself moved by the fact that the books have pages. It is a small epiphany, and Fitzgerald honors it by bringing the man back at the end, when the epiphany matures into the only honest eulogy the novel offers. “The poor son of a bitch” is crude and it is true, and it comes from a man who bothered to come. Klipspringer, by contrast, perceives nothing. He does not marvel at the house. He does not notice the reunion happening three feet from his piano bench. He does not register, on the telephone, that the man whose servant he is asking for favors is dead. His great organ is appetite, and appetite does not perceive. It only wants.

The difference extends to their relationships with Gatsby’s property, and this is where the comparison becomes a moral instrument. Owl Eyes treats Gatsby’s library with reverence; he is overwhelmed that the books are real, which means he understands, however drunkenly, that the house contains things worthy of respect. Klipspringer treats Gatsby’s house as an extension of his own body: his bedroom, his piano, his shoes left behind, his butler to forward them. Owl Eyes is a guest who knows he is a guest. Klipspringer is a guest who has forgotten the category exists. That forgetting is the deeper charge against him. Ingratitude can be forgiven as a failure of manners. The inability to recognize that one is a guest in another man’s house is a failure of moral vision, and it is incurable, because the man who cannot see the house as someone else’s will never see the funeral as something he owes.

There is also a difference in what each man costs the narrative, and it is worth stating because it explains why Fitzgerald needed both. Owl Eyes costs the novel nothing and pays it back with interest: two scenes, both of them earning their place, the second redeeming the first. Klipspringer costs the novel its comfort and pays it back with a laugh that turns into a wince. Owl Eyes is the proof that the crowd was not entirely worthless, the exception that keeps the indictment from becoming a caricature. Klipspringer is the proof that the rule was real, the representative case that keeps the exception from becoming an excuse. Without Owl Eyes, the novel’s judgment on the party world would feel total and therefore easy to dismiss. Without Klipspringer, it would feel partial and therefore easy to forgive. Together they are the novel’s complete statement: some of them could see, and one of them, the one who lived there, could not.

Why is Klipspringer not the same kind of hanger-on as the party crowd?

The party crowd visits and Klipspringer resides, and that difference in duration creates a difference in kind. A party guest’s parasitism is bounded by the evening; the host consents to it when he sends the invitation, and the guest’s departure restores the moral order.

Klipspringer’s parasitism has no evening and no departure; it is a standing arrangement, renewed every morning he comes downstairs, and it converts the host’s generosity from an event into a condition. The crowd borrows the party. Klipspringer borrows the house. To study the crowd is to study a social phenomenon. To study Klipspringer is to study what the phenomenon looks like when it moves in.

The group portrait of the party world has its own full treatment in the hangers-on study, which maps the crowd’s sociology in the round. This study keeps its lens tight on the one man because the tight lens is the argument. The crowd is a weather system; you cannot indict weather. Klipspringer is a man; you can watch him choose the shoes over the funeral, and the watching is the point. Fitzgerald understood that a novel cannot prosecute a crowd, only exhibit it, but it can prosecute an individual, and so he distilled the crowd’s essence, its appetite without gratitude, its presence without attention, into a single boarder with shell-rimmed glasses, and let the distillation do the work the crowd could not do.

The Parasitic Crowd, Crystallized in One Man

This is the place to state the study’s central claim in its strongest form, because the preceding sections have built the evidence for it and the claim needs to be owned, not implied. Klipspringer is not a minor comic figure who happens to illustrate the theme of parasitic wealth. He is the theme, compressed. Fitzgerald’s novel is, among many other things, an anatomy of a particular social arrangement: the rich man who buys company and the company that lets itself be bought, each side pretending the transaction is something nobler than it is. The parties are the arrangement’s public face. Klipspringer is its private truth, the arrangement with the music stopped and the guests gone home, reduced to one man in a sport shirt eating another man’s food in another man’s house on a Tuesday. Everything the crowd does noisily, he does quietly. Everything the crowd does on weekends, he does every day. He is the crowd’s essence with the crowd removed, and essences are easier to judge than crowds.

The crystallization works because Klipspringer strips away the two things that make the party crowd tolerable to the reader: glamour and variety. The parties are glamorous, and glamour is a kind of moral anesthesia; it is hard to condemn people who are having that much fun in that much lamplight. The crowd is various, and variety is a kind of moral diffusion; no single face stays still long enough to be judged. Klipspringer has no glamour. He is slightly worn, out of practice, dressed in duck trousers of a nebulous hue. And he has no variety. He is one man, seen twice, doing the same thing twice: taking. Remove the anesthesia and the diffusion, and what remains is the bare mechanism, appetite without gratitude, and the bareness is the indictment. Fitzgerald did not need to write an essay about parasitism. He needed to write a boarder.

It is important to be precise about what kind of parasite he is, because the novel contains several species and the distinctions carry the moral weight. Tom Buchanan is a predator, a man who takes by force and pays with the impunity of his class. Daisy is a drifter, a woman who takes devotion and pays with the currency of her voice, which is real but insufficient. Wolfshiem is a businessman, a man who takes profit and pays with genuine, if useless, feeling. The party guests are grazers, moving from house to house, consuming what is offered and moving on. Klipspringer is something rarer and more revealing: a settler. He does not graze and move on. He stays. The settler is the most honest of the species, because he drops the pretense that the arrangement is temporary, and the most damning, because his permanence proves that the host’s generosity was never a party but a condition, a standing offer to be used. Tom’s predation can be blamed on Tom. Klipspringer’s settlement implicates Gatsby, because it took Gatsby’s sustained permission to happen, and Gatsby gave it.

The study has promised to keep Klipspringer distinct from the group analysis, and the promise is kept by the direction of the argument. The group study asks what the crowd was. This study asks what the crowd meant, and answers with one man. Every general statement about the parasitic world of the novel can be tested against Klipspringer, and the test is always the same: does the general statement survive contact with the specific case? “The party guests were careless.” Klipspringer was careless about a funeral. “The party guests took Gatsby’s hospitality for granted.” Klipspringer took it so completely for granted that he telephoned the grieving household about his shoes. “The party guests disappeared when the money stopped.” Klipspringer never disappeared, which is worse, because his continued presence proves that the money was never the point; the point was the taking, and the taking continued past death. The specific case does not illustrate the general statement. It convicts it.

What breaks in the novel if Klipspringer attends the funeral?

The indictment breaks, or at least it softens past recognition. The novel needs one absence to be total, and it chose the man who lived in the house, because his absence is the one that cannot be explained away. The party guests can be excused: they barely knew him.

Daisy can be, if barely, understood: she is a coward and Tom is her alibi. Wolfshiem has his code. But the boarder, the man who ate at the table for months, has no excuse in the novel’s moral vocabulary, and his empty chair is the exact size of the book’s judgment on the parasitic life. If he came, if he stood in the rain with Owl Eyes and wiped his shell-rimmed glasses, the reader could conclude that even the worst of them felt something. Fitzgerald did not want the reader to conclude that. He wanted the telephone call.

Consider the counterfactual seriously for a moment, because it shows how carefully the absence is constructed. Suppose Klipspringer attends. He stands at the back. He says nothing. He leaves early. What changes? The Chapter 9 accounting loses its sharpest entry. Nick’s “Huh!” never happens. The shoes never become the novel’s final word on the household. And the reader loses the one moment where ingratitude is not inferred but heard, live, in a voice. The funeral would still be sparsely attended. The judgment would still land. But it would land as sociology, as a statement about crowds, and sociology is easy to agree with and easy to forget. The call makes it personal, and the personal is what the novel is for. Fitzgerald kept Klipspringer away from the grave so that he could bring him to the telephone, and the telephone is the crueler venue, because at the grave he could have hidden in the crowd, and on the telephone there is nowhere to hide.

The Name on the Door: Ewing Klipspringer

Fitzgerald names his people with a jeweler’s care, and the name he gives the boarder repays attention. “Ewing Klipspringer” is an awkward mouthful, all elbows, and it sounds like the name of a vaudeville act or a patent medicine. Say it aloud and it trips: the soft “Ewing” giving way to the clipped, spring-loaded “Klipspringer,” a surname that seems to contain its own nervous energy, a clip and a spring. Against the novel’s other names it stands out precisely because it does not sound chosen. Gatsby chose his name, discarding Gatz for something with lift and shine in it. Daisy Fay became Daisy Buchanan, trading one music for another. Tom Buchanan was born to his. Nick Carraway carries his like luggage. Klipspringer’s name sounds neither chosen nor inherited but issued, as if the novel’s casting office handed him a tag and he never bothered to change it. The effect is to make him feel slightly unreal, a figure rather than a person, which is exactly what he is: not a character with an interior but a function with a name tag.

The novel is careful about who uses which name, and the distribution is a small map of the household’s affections. Gatsby calls him “Ewing.” It is the only warm address Klipspringer receives in the book, and it comes, both times we hear it, at moments of use: “Ewing!” called out when music is wanted, and “Don’t you, Ewing, old sport?” when the piano bench needs filling. The first name is the leash. It is intimate the way a master’s voice is intimate with a dog, a sound that means come here. Nick, who narrates, never calls him Ewing. Nick calls him Klipspringer, or “the boarder,” maintaining the full surname distance of a man who has decided, early, that this person is not worth knowing better. The distance is itself a judgment. Nick learns the Christian names of people he respects or pities. He keeps Klipspringer at surname length for the whole novel, and the consistency is the closest Nick comes to contempt.

There is a further irony in the name that the novel never states but the reader feels. “Klipspringer” contains “spring,” and the man is the opposite of springlike: he is sedentary, settled, a creature of the couch and the piano bench. Names in the novel often work by ironic reversal, Gatsby the least “gay” in the old sense of carefree, being the most haunted man in West Egg, and Klipspringer fits the pattern. He is named for energy and embodies inertia. He is called a boarder and pays no board. He is summoned as “Ewing” and answers as a function. The name is a small machine for producing the novel’s larger effect: the gap between what things are called and what they are, which is also the gap between Gatsby’s dream and Gatsby’s house, between the parties and the funeral, between the guest list and the grave.

A reader who wants to test this should try a simple substitution exercise, the kind this study recommends for the classroom and the common reader alike. Replace “Klipspringer” in the telephone passage with any ordinary name, “Smith” or “Jones” or “Williams,” and read it again. The passage still works, but it loses a layer of its comedy, because part of what makes “This is Klipspringer” funny is the name itself arriving on the line like a vaudeville entrance. Now replace it with a grander name, something with weight in it. The passage collapses, because a grand name would imply a person of consequence, and the whole point is that the caller is of no consequence and knows it. Fitzgerald’s naming is doing load-bearing work here. The awkwardness of “Ewing Klipspringer” is the awkwardness of the man, and the man is the awkwardness of the arrangement, and the arrangement is the novel’s subject.

The Comedy of Ingratitude

The telephone passage is one of the funniest in the novel, and the funniness is not an accident of tone but a deliberate instrument. Fitzgerald understood something about moral judgment that preachers forget: a vice described is debatable, but a vice overheard is convicted. Nobody argues with the telephone call. Nobody reads “they’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them” and thinks, well, perhaps he had a point. The comedy bypasses the reader’s defenses the way the call bypassed Nick’s hope, and once it is past the defenses, the judgment is already delivered. This is why the study insists that the laughter is the mechanism, not the decoration. Take the comedy out and you have a sad anecdote about a missed funeral. Leave it in and you have an indictment that the reader delivers against herself, because she laughed before she judged, and the laugh implicates her in the world being judged.

The technique deserves a close look, because it is portable: a reader who understands how Fitzgerald builds this laugh understands a large part of how the novel builds its effects. The passage runs on bathos, the sudden drop from the high to the low, and Fitzgerald stages the drop with architectural precision. The high is Nick’s relief, the promise of “another friend at Gatsby’s grave,” the funeral details given with pastoral care. The low is footwear. Between them comes the long, winding staircase of the excuse, the Greenwich picnic, the “very best,” each step lowering the reader one more degree, until the pivot sentence drops the floor entirely: “What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there.” The genius of the pivot is the word “was.” It reclassifies everything before it. The condolence was never the purpose. The purpose was always the shoes. A lesser writer would have had Klipspringer blurt the request early, or apologize for it, or bury it. Fitzgerald lets him walk the reader down the full staircase and then removes the floor, and the reader’s stomach drops with Nick’s.

The smaller comic units inside the passage are worth cataloguing, because each one is a lesson in how Fitzgerald writes character through diction. “There’s a sort of picnic or something” gets its laugh from the “or something,” which dissolves the excuse even as it offers it; the man cannot commit to the reality of his own alibi. “I’m sort of helpless without them” gets its laugh from the “sort of,” which downgrades helplessness from a condition to a hobby; the man is not helpless, he is helpless-adjacent, and he expects the household to manage the adjacency. “My address is care of B. F.” gets its laugh from the cutoff, Nick hanging up mid-syllable, which is the narrative equivalent of a door slamming on a sentence. And presiding over all of it is Nick’s “Huh!,” two characters and an exclamation point that contain more honest criticism than any essay on the novel. The “Huh!” is what the reader wants to say. Fitzgerald lets Nick say it first, which is a generosity: the narrator absorbs the reader’s outrage so the reader is free to feel the comedy underneath it.

A before and after repair makes the mechanism visible. Here is the passage with the comedy removed, the way a plot summary would render it: Klipspringer telephoned, said he probably could not attend the funeral because of a social engagement, and asked that his tennis shoes be forwarded to his new address. Accurate, complete, and dead. Nothing in that summary would make a reader remember Klipspringer five minutes later. Now restore Fitzgerald’s version: the frightened demand for identification, the relieved “This is Klipspringer,” Nick’s own relief, the hasty promise, the suspicious tone, the “certainly try,” the interruption, the picnic “or something,” the “Huh!,” the pivot, the “sort of helpless,” the cutoff address, the hung-up receiver. Every addition is a comic choice, and every comic choice is a moral choice, because each one makes the ingratitude more specific, and specificity is what makes judgment possible. General ingratitude is a theme. Specific ingratitude, in shell-rimmed glasses, asking about tennis shoes, is a conviction.

The comedy also does defensive work for the novel’s larger design. Chapter 9 is relentlessly bleak: the murder, the empty house, the futile calls, the father with his schedule of self-improvement, the rain at the grave. Unrelieved bleakness would push the reader away; the reader can only absorb so much judgment before she stops listening. The Klipspringer call is the chapter’s pressure valve, the one place where the bleakness breaks into laughter, and the laughter keeps the reader in the room for the judgment that follows. Fitzgerald the craftsman knew that a reader who has just laughed is a reader whose attention is fully engaged, and he spends that attention immediately: the passage after the call is Nick’s shame for Gatsby, the reflection on the sneering caller, the deepening of the chapter’s moral accounting. The joke is not a break from the chapter’s work. It is the chapter’s work, done in a different key.

One final note on the “Huh!” belongs here, because it is the passage’s most imitated and least understood syllable. Readers remember it as a joke, and it is one, but it is also the exact sound of a moral reflex, the noise a decent person makes when decency has no vocabulary left. Nick has spent the chapter being polite to terrible people: the condolence callers, the businesslike coroner, Wolfshiem’s secretary. The “Huh!” is the politeness breaking, and its breaking is a relief, because the reader has been waiting for someone in the novel to react the way she is reacting. Fitzgerald gives the reaction to Nick rather than keeping it for the narrator’s summary, and the choice matters: a summarized judgment can be debated, but an ejaculated “Huh!” is already past debate. It is the body judging before the mind has finished the sentence.

The Man With No Inside

There is one more thing the novel does to Klipspringer that it does to no other figure of his size, and it is the subtlest of Fitzgerald’s judgments. Nick never reports a single thought of his. Every other character of any weight gets interiority, or at least the speculation of interiority: Nick wonders what Gatsby is thinking when the bewilderment comes back into his face, he interprets Daisy’s voice as full of money, he even grants Wolfshiem a motive speech about the fine woman his mother would have been. Klipspringer gets surfaces only. Clothes. Protest. Song. Telephone hedging. We know what he wears, what he plays, and what he wants mailed to Greenwich. We do not know what he thinks about any of it, because the novel proceeds as if there is nothing to know.

Two readings of this flatness are possible, and the study should hold both, because their tension is productive. The first reading says the flatness is mimetic: Klipspringer has no inside, or none that matters, because a life organized entirely around comfort does not generate an interior life. Thought is the friction of unmet desire against the world, and Klipspringer has arranged for his desires to be met before they can friction. He wants a house, and there is one. He wants music to be someone else’s problem, and it is. He wants shoes, and he telephones about them. A man whose every want is outsourced to a household has no need of reflection, and the novel, faithful to its subject, reflects nothing back. On this reading, the absence of interiority is realism. Some people are all surface, and Fitzgerald had the courage to write one.

The second reading says the flatness is punitive: Fitzgerald denies Klipspringer an inside as a form of sentence. The novel grants interiority as a mark of moral seriousness. Gatsby’s mind is worth entering because Gatsby’s hope, however misdirected, is a real spiritual event. Daisy’s voice is worth interpreting because her carelessness has weight and consequence. To give Klipspringer a thought, a doubt, a midnight reflection on the kindness of his host, would be to humanize the function, and the function must not be humanized, because its inhumanity is the point. The punishment fits the crime with terrible precision. The man who treated the household as a convenience is treated by the narrative as one: useful twice, and otherwise unexamined. The novel does to Klipspringer exactly what Klipspringer did to Gatsby. It uses him and does not think about him.

The evidence for the second reading is in the two speeches the novel does grant him, because both are performances of the same disclaimer. At the piano: “I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play.” On the telephone: “You see, they’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them.” Put them side by side and the rhyme is unmistakable. Both begin with a confession of inadequacy. Both use “you see” as a wheedling confidential. Both convert inability into a reason for other people to adjust: play badly and be excused, be helpless and be served. These are not windows into a soul. They are scripts, and the fact that he has only two scripts, one for being summoned and one for summoning, suggests a repertoire rather than a mind. Fitzgerald gives him exactly enough language to operate the machinery of dependence and not one word more.

A concrete exercise makes the flatness visible. List everything the novel tells us about Klipspringer’s feelings. The list is empty. Now list everything it tells us about his wants: music to be excused from, a funeral to be excused from, shoes to be forwarded. The second list is the character. Now try the same exercise for any other minor figure. Owl Eyes: wonder at the books, grief at the grave. The man in the ditch: embarrassment, then bravado. Even the briefest party guests get a flicker, a torn dress mourned, a drunken quarrel regretted. Only Klipspringer is pure want, unaccompanied by feeling, and the purity is what makes him the novel’s most complete minor creation. Fitzgerald did not fail to imagine his interior. He imagined it and found it empty, and reported the emptiness faithfully.

This is also why the namable claim of this study works as a complete description. “The guest who wanted his shoes back” is not a summary of Klipspringer. It is the whole of him, because there is no remainder. With Gatsby, any summary leaves a remainder: the green light, the shirts, the hope that exceeds the summary. With Daisy, any summary leaves the voice. With Klipspringer, the sentence about the shoes leaves nothing out, because there is nothing else. He is the one character in the novel who can be exhausted by a single line, and the exhaustion is Fitzgerald’s final verdict on the parasitic life: it is not deep enough to drown in. It is a puddle, and the shoes are the only things in it.

Why Two Scenes Are Enough

A reasonable reader might object that this study has built sixteen thousand words on a character who occupies perhaps six pages of the novel, and the objection deserves an answer, because the answer is part of the argument. Fitzgerald’s economy with Klipspringer is not a limitation to work around. It is the technique being studied. The novel gives him two scenes because two scenes are all he needs, and understanding why they are enough teaches something about how fiction works at its most disciplined.

The first reason is that the two scenes are load-bearing in opposite directions. The piano scene establishes the taking: months of residence, a summons, a reluctant performance. The telephone scene establishes the not-giving: a funeral dodged, a household conscripted, shoes requested. Between them, the reader’s mind supplies everything the novel declines to show, the weekdays, the meals, the slow accumulation, and the supplying is more damning than any depiction could be, because the reader becomes complicit in constructing the indictment. Fitzgerald understood that a character described in full can be argued with, but a character sketched in two strokes must be completed by the reader, and the reader always completes him in the harshest available colors. The six pages are not a shortage of evidence. They are a trap.

The second reason is rhythmic. The novel is built from a small number of set pieces, the parties, the reunion, the Plaza confrontation, the funeral, and the minor figures are distributed among them like instruments in an orchestra, each entering once or twice to play a single note. To give Klipspringer a third scene, a backstory, a moment of reflection, would be to promote him out of his function. He is a minor character in the strong sense: his minorness is his meaning. The moment he became major, with interiority and arc and development, he would stop being the thing the novel needs him to be, which is the crowd made singular. Fitzgerald’s discipline here is worth naming because it is rare. Most novelists, having invented a funny freeloader, would be tempted to bring him back for a third laugh. Fitzgerald brings him back for a judgment.

The third reason is that the two scenes rhyme, and the rhyme does the work of ten scenes. Piano, then telephone. Summons, then evasion. Sneakers, then tennis shoes. “I’m all out of practice,” then “I’m sort of helpless without them.” Gatsby’s “Play!” then Nick’s hung-up receiver. Each pair is a complete moral circuit: the first scene shows what the household gives him, the second shows what he gives the household, and the symmetry makes the asymmetry unmistakable. A third scene would break the symmetry without adding information. The novel’s most devastating effects are often these closed circuits, two points with a wire between them, and Klipspringer’s wire is the straightest in the book.

There is a practical lesson here for the reader learning to read closely. When a novel gives a minor figure exactly two appearances, put them side by side and look for the rhyme before looking for anything else. The rhyme is where the author hid the meaning. In Klipspringer’s case the rhyme is footwear, helplessness, and the movement from being fetched to being hung up on, and once you see it, the six pages expand to fill the whole novel, because every party scene now has a boarder in it and every absence now has a telephone. That is why this study is long and the character is short. The length is not padding. It is the sound of the rhyme echoing.

Verdict

The claim this study opened with has not moved, because the evidence has not moved it: Klipspringer is the guest who wanted his shoes back. He enters the novel in sneakers, summoned to a piano he plays badly, and he exits it on a telephone, asking for tennis shoes to be mailed to Greenwich. Between those two points he lives for months in a house that is not his, eats food he did not buy, and contributes one reluctant performance to the most important afternoon of his host’s life. He does not attend the funeral. He does not send word. He calls about footwear, and the call is the novel’s final statement on what hospitality without love produces: not enmity, which would at least be a relationship, but a kind of moral weightlessness, a man so unanchored by gratitude that he floats past a grave on his way to his shoes.

The verdict the novel delivers on him is not hatred but something colder, which is exact measurement. Fitzgerald does not punish Klipspringer. He does not need to. He simply records him, twice, with total accuracy, and lets the record do the punishing. The piano scene records the taking. The telephone call records the not-giving. Between them there is nothing to record, because there is nothing there, and the nothing is the point. A character who can be fully captured in two scenes is a character the novel has judged to be fully capturable, a man with no depths to plumb and no heights to fall from. The tragedy of Klipspringer is not that he falls. It is that there is nowhere for him to fall from, and nowhere for him to fall to, except Greenwich, where some people rather expect him for a picnic or something.

Readers who came to this study expecting a defense of the boarder will not have found one, and readers who came expecting a simple denunciation will have found something more useful: an account of how the novel builds its judgment out of comedy, specificity, and the careful placement of shoes. The guest who wanted his shoes back is funny until he is not, and the moment he stops being funny is the moment the novel’s moral vision comes into focus. Gatsby dreamed of a world where devotion would be answered. Klipspringer is the world’s answer: a dial tone, a “Huh!,” and a request to have the butler send on the tennis shoes.

Study: Reading Klipspringer Closely

This section turns the analysis into work the reader can do, because a character study that cannot be used is only a performance. The tasks below are designed for the common reader with a copy of the novel and an hour, and for the student with an essay to write. Each one isolates a skill the preceding sections practiced: staying close to the text, testing a claim against a specific passage, and refusing to let a comic surface deflect a moral question.

First, re-read the piano passage in Chapter 5 with the telephone call already in mind. Read it once the way the novel presents it, as a slightly awkward interlude in the reunion, and then read it again knowing where the sneakers lead. Notice how the second reading changes the protest “I’m all out of practice.” On the first reading it is modesty. On the second it is a mission statement: the man is out of practice at everything except taking. Notice, too, how Gatsby’s “Don’t talk so much, old sport. Play!” sounds different when you know that this is the last order Klipspringer will ever obey, and that his next communication with the household will be a request, not a compliance. The exercise teaches the novel’s central reading skill, which is retroactive attention: Fitzgerald plants details whose meaning arrives chapters later, and the reader who re-reads is the reader the novel was written for.

Second, trace the word “boarder” through the novel and through your own assumptions. Nick’s sentence, the man “was there so often and so long that he became known as ‘the boarder,’” is the only explanation of the arrangement the book offers. Write out what a boarder ordinarily is, a paying lodger with a room and a set of obligations, and then list, from the text, what Klipspringer pays and what his obligations are. The list will be short on both sides, and the shortness is the discovery. Then ask the harder question: who else in the novel is a boarder in this ironic sense? Daisy boards in Tom’s house, taking its protection without paying its moral rent. The party guests board in Gatsby’s weekends. The word, once pulled, unravels a thread that runs through the whole book, and Klipspringer is the thread’s visible end.

Third, compare the two telephone behaviors in Chapter 9 as a paired exercise. Klipspringer calls Nick, asks for shoes, and gets hung up on. Wolfshiem is called by Nick, refuses to come, and sends a letter instead. Put the two refusals side by side and ask which is worse. Wolfshiem’s is the more considered: he has reasons, a code, a genuine if self-serving grief. Klipspringer’s is the more casual: he has a picnic, or something. Most readers will judge Wolfshiem the greater villain, because his refusal is deliberate, and most readers will be wrong in an instructive way, because deliberation at least acknowledges the weight of what is being refused. Klipspringer’s casualness is the deeper moral failure. It does not refuse the funeral. It forgets the funeral was the subject. The exercise trains the reader to distinguish kinds of absence, which is Chapter 9’s master skill.

Fourth, practice the study’s method on a paragraph of your own. Take the sentence “I’m sort of helpless without them” and write two hundred words on it, staying as close to the diction as the sections above stayed close to the piano passage. Account for the “sort of.” Account for the “you see.” Account for the fact that the sentence is about shoes and is spoken to a man arranging a funeral. Then write a second paragraph that does the opposite: summarize the sentence’s meaning in plain terms, without quoting it. Compare the two paragraphs and notice which one convinces. The first will, because the novel convinces by specificity, and the exercise is the whole of this study in miniature: stay with the words, and the judgment takes care of itself.

Fifth, test the study’s central claim against a hostile reader, which is the best use of a character study. Imagine a friend who says Klipspringer is being judged too harshly: he is a harmless drifter, a comic bit player, and the novel clearly loves him enough to give him the funniest scene in Chapter 9. Answer the friend in writing, using only evidence from the two scenes. You will find yourself reaching for the ledger: the months of residence against the single piano performance, the “Ewing!” summons against the Greenwich picnic, the sneakers against the tennis shoes. You will find, too, that the friend’s defense collapses at exactly one point, the butler. A harmless drifter does not ask a grieving household to do his errands. Write the collapse out, sentence by sentence, and you will have written a verdict. The exercise teaches the difference between a character who is funny and a character who is only funny, and Klipspringer, on the evidence, is the second kind wearing the costume of the first.

The passages cited throughout this study, the piano scene and the telephone call in their full context, can be examined in the annotated text of the novel, where the surrounding chapters make visible how deliberately Fitzgerald placed the boarder’s two appearances. Readers tracing the minor figures across the book’s full span will also find the minor characters map useful as a navigational reference for where Klipspringer sits among the novel’s smaller roles.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Klipspringer in The Great Gatsby?

Klipspringer, whose first name is Ewing, is the man Nick calls “the boarder,” a hanger on who lives in Gatsby’s mansion for months without paying rent or holding any clear position in the household. He appears in only two scenes: in Chapter 5, when Gatsby fetches him to play the piano during the reunion with Daisy, and in Chapter 9, when he telephones Nick after Gatsby’s death to ask about a pair of tennis shoes he left behind. Nick introduces him with the famous line that he was at Gatsby’s so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder,” adding that he doubts Klipspringer had any other home. He is slightly worn, wears shell-rimmed glasses, and plays the piano badly. His function in the novel is to embody the parasitic side of Gatsby’s world in a single, specific person rather than a blur of party guests.

What does the name Ewing Klipspringer suggest about him?

The name sounds awkward and slightly comic, like a vaudeville act, and that awkwardness is the characterization. “Ewing” is soft and unremarkable, while “Klipspringer” trips off the tongue with a nervous, spring-loaded energy that the man himself entirely lacks. He is sedentary and settled, the opposite of springlike, so the name works by the ironic reversal Fitzgerald favors. It is also revealing that the novel rations the name: Gatsby calls him “Ewing,” the intimate first name of a master summoning a dependent, while Nick, the narrator, keeps him at the full surname distance of “Klipspringer” or “the boarder” for the entire book. The distribution maps the household’s real affections. Nobody in the novel treats him as a person worth knowing by his first name except the man who is using him.

How does Nick introduce Klipspringer as “the boarder”?

Nick introduces him in a single sentence during the description of Gatsby’s household: a man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder,” and Nick doubts he had any other home. The quotation marks around “the boarder” are doing quiet ironic work. A boarder is ordinarily a lodger who pays for room and board, but Klipspringer pays for nothing, so the title describes the shape of the arrangement while inverting its substance. The grammar of the sentence is also telling: “so often and so long” is duration without event, because nothing about his residence is eventful. He did not arrive; he accumulated. The introduction gives no backstory, no explanation of how the arrangement began, and that blank is itself the point. He is not a person with a history who happens to freeload. He is freeloading with a person attached.

Why does Klipspringer live at Gatsby’s mansion?

The novel never explains how the arrangement began, which is itself the explanation: Klipspringer lives there because Gatsby’s hospitality is indiscriminate and Klipspringer’s appetite is constant. Gatsby bought a mansion to attract Daisy and filled it with people to prove he belonged, and a man who simply never left was the natural product of a house with no gatekeeping. For Klipspringer, the mansion solves every problem of existence at once: shelter, food, drink, status, and a piano. For Gatsby, the permanent guest solves a quieter problem: a house with a resident feels like a home rather than a stage set, and Gatsby desperately needs his mansion to pass as a home. The tragedy is that Gatsby cannot distinguish between being used and being loved, because no one in his adult life has loved him without using him, and Klipspringer’s staying looks, from inside that confusion, like loyalty.

Why is Klipspringer called a boarder instead of a guest?

A guest is invited for an occasion; a boarder resides. The word “boarder” captures the chronic nature of Klipspringer’s parasitism as opposed to the episodic parasitism of the party crowd, who arrive, consume, and depart. Guests leave. Klipspringer stays, which makes him a different species of hanger on: not a visitor but a fixture, not an event but a condition. The word also carries its ordinary meaning, a lodger who pays, and the gap between that meaning and Klipspringer’s rent-free existence is the joke Nick’s quotation marks are marking. He boards in the sense that a ship takes on cargo. The label matters because it is the novel’s way of distinguishing him from the hundreds of faces at the parties. The crowd can be described as guests. Only Klipspringer has converted guesthood into residence, and the conversion is what makes him indictable as an individual rather than merely observable as a crowd.

How long has Klipspringer been living at Gatsby’s house?

The novel never says, and the refusal to say is deliberate. Nick’s introduction gives duration without dates: Klipspringer was there “so often and so long” that the household coined a title for him, which suggests months rather than weeks, long enough for his presence to become furniture. But Fitzgerald withholds any origin scene, no invitation, no first meeting, no explanation, because an origin would make him a person with a history. The blank where his past should be is the characterization. He exists in the novel only as a function of the house, and functions do not have biographies. The vagueness also serves the theme: parasitic arrangements like his do not begin with a decision anyone remembers. They begin with a man staying for dinner, then for the weekend, then indefinitely, until one day the household realizes he has no other home. The novel starts the story after that realization, which is where the moral interest lies.

What does Klipspringer wear when he plays the piano in Chapter 5?

When Gatsby fetches him, Klipspringer arrives as an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with shell-rimmed glasses and scant blond hair, decently clothed in a sport shirt open at the neck, sneakers, and duck trousers of a nebulous hue. Every item is doing work. The shell-rimmed glasses suggest a reader who never reads. The sport shirt, open at the neck, is leisure wear on a man whose entire life is leisure. The duck trousers are yachting-country costume, the uniform of a class he borrows without buying. And the sneakers are the detail that closes the circuit of the novel: the man enters the narrative in soft shoes and will exit it, four chapters later, asking for his tennis shoes to be mailed to Greenwich. Fitzgerald plants the footwear in the first scene and harvests it in the last. The costume is not description for its own sake. It is the whole character, dressed and ready, before he plays a note.

What two songs does Klipspringer play in Chapter 5?

He plays “The Love Nest” first, then, after protesting that he is out of practice and being ordered by Gatsby to stop talking and play, he plays “Ain’t We Got Fun.” The sequence matters. “The Love Nest” is the warm-up, the song he chooses, and it passes almost unnoticed. “Ain’t We Got Fun” is the song Gatsby commands, and Nick transcribes its lyrics: “In the morning, in the evening, ain’t we got fun,” and then the verse that bites, “One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer, the rich get richer and the poor get children. In the meantime, in between time.” A man who owns nothing is singing to a man who owns everything a jaunty vaudeville number about the rich getting richer, while the richest man’s reunion with the woman he loves happens a few feet away in the gloom, unheard by the singer. The song choice is Fitzgerald’s, not Klipspringer’s, and it turns a mediocre piano performance into a commentary on the entire household.

Why does Klipspringer play the piano in the novel?

The piano playing is the single largest contribution Klipspringer ever makes to the household, and Fitzgerald stages it to reveal the exact nature of the exchange. Gatsby fetches him in person, calling “Ewing!” through the house, because the reunion with Daisy needs music and the boarder is the only musician on the premises. Klipspringer protests that he is out of practice, plays badly, and is ordered to continue: “Don’t talk so much, old sport. Play!” The command exposes the real economy. He is not a guest being entertained but staff being put to use, staff who had forgotten he was staff because the house had never asked anything of him before. Thematically, the scene makes him the soundtrack to a love story that has no use for him; Gatsby and Daisy are too absorbed in each other to hear him, and Nick walks out into the rain. He gives the house music, reluctantly, and the house gives him everything else.

Why does Gatsby tell Klipspringer to stop talking and play?

Gatsby has spent the entire afternoon trembling with the effort of making the reunion perfect, and Klipspringer’s repeated protests, “I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play,” are threatening to puncture the spell. The command, “Don’t talk so much, old sport. Play!” is the moment Gatsby drops the courtship voice entirely and speaks as the master of the house to a dependent. The “old sport” is the giveaway: it is Gatsby’s universal solvent of address, poured over everyone from Nick to strangers, and here it lands on a man being told to stop talking and work. The line reveals that Gatsby understands the arrangement perfectly well when he needs to. Klipspringer is not a friend. He is a resource, summoned like a servant, and the one time the household requires something of him, the velvet of hospitality comes off. The harshness is also self-revelation: for all his hope, Gatsby knows exactly what his boarder is.

What does Klipspringer represent?

Klipspringer represents the parasitic crowd of Gatsby’s world condensed into a single, indictable person. Where the parties are a blur of faces, he is one face, and one face can be judged. He embodies appetite without gratitude: he takes shelter, food, drink, and status from the mansion for months and gives back one reluctant piano performance and, finally, a telephone call about shoes. More precisely, he represents what the party logic looks like when it stops being temporary. The guests visit; he resides. The guests consume an evening; he consumes a household. In that sense he is the honest version of the crowd, the one who dropped the pretense that the arrangement was ever anything but taking. Fitzgerald uses him to prove that the moral problem of the novel’s social world is not the glamour of the parties but the bareness underneath it, and Klipspringer is that bareness with shell-rimmed glasses.

How does Klipspringer differ from Owl Eyes?

Both men are comic beneficiaries of Gatsby’s hospitality, but Fitzgerald places them at opposite ends of the novel’s moral action. Owl Eyes perceives: drunk in the library, he marvels that Gatsby’s books are real, with pages and everything, and at the funeral he returns to deliver the novel’s only honest eulogy, “the poor son of a bitch.” Klipspringer perceives nothing: he does not notice the reunion happening beside his piano bench, and on the telephone he does not register that his host is dead. Owl Eyes treats the house with reverence, understanding it contains things worthy of respect. Klipspringer treats the house as an extension of his own body, his bedroom, his piano, his shoes, his butler to forward them. Owl Eyes is a guest who knows he is a guest. Klipspringer has forgotten the category exists. One comes back. One calls about shoes. The pairing is the novel’s controlled experiment in gratitude, and its result is the sentence this study has carried throughout: the guest who wanted his shoes back is the crowd’s essence with the crowd removed, and essences are easier to judge than crowds.

Why does Fitzgerald give Klipspringer no backstory?

Because a backstory would make him a person, and Fitzgerald needs him to be a function. Daisy gets Louisville, Gatsby gets North Dakota and Dan Cody, and Klipspringer gets sneakers and a piano bench, because his past is irrelevant to his role: he is the parasitic life with a name tag, not a biography with a parasitic phase. The blank also mirrors how such arrangements actually form. Nobody remembers the day the freeloader moved in; there was dinner, then the weekend, then indefinitely, until the household realized he had no other home. An origin scene would falsely imply a decision, a moment when Gatsby chose this. The truth Fitzgerald wants is creepier: no one chose it. It accumulated, the way dust accumulates, and by the time anyone noticed, it was furniture. The absence of a past is also what lets him stand for the whole crowd. A man with a history is an individual. A man without one is an essence, and essences can carry themes.

Why is Klipspringer absent from the funeral?

In the novel’s terms, he is absent because he does not want to come and has a picnic, or something, in Greenwich instead. When Nick invites him, Klipspringer hedges through the famous excuse: he will certainly try, he is staying with some people up here in Greenwich, they rather expect him tomorrow, there is a sort of picnic or something, he will do his very best to get away. The excuse is transparent, and Nick hears through it instantly. Thematically, he is absent because his absence is the one the novel cannot excuse. The party guests barely knew Gatsby. Daisy is a coward. Wolfshiem has his code. But the boarder, the man who ate at the table for months, has no excuse in the book’s moral vocabulary, and his empty chair is the exact size of its judgment on the parasitic life. Fitzgerald kept him from the grave so he could bring him to the telephone, where his ingratitude could be heard live instead of merely inferred.

How does Klipspringer’s telephone manner reveal his character?

Everything about the call is self-protective and self-serving. He demands to know who is speaking before he will give his name, the frightened etiquette of a man who has lived on tolerance and knows it. When Nick identifies himself, Klipspringer says, with relief, “This is Klipspringer,” as if the danger has passed, and the relief tells us he was worried about being recognized, which tells us he knows what he owes. His promises are built from hedges: “Oh, I will,” followed instantly by “of course I’m not likely to see anybody,” and “I’ll certainly try,” which means maybe. When pressed, he produces the doubled throat clearing of “the fact is, the truth of the matter is,” the sound of a man with no facts. And then the pivot, “What I called up about was,” reveals that the condolence was never the purpose. The manner is the man: evasive, wheedling, and organized entirely around his own comfort, even on a call about a funeral.

What does Nick mean when he says Klipspringer’s tone made him suspicious?

Nick has just invited Klipspringer to the funeral and asked him to spread the word, and Klipspringer replies, “Oh, I will. Of course I’m not likely to see anybody, but if I do.” The haste of the promise collides with its immediate retraction, and Nick, who has spent two days being disappointed by Gatsby’s friends, hears the collision. The suspicion is the instinct of a man who has learned to listen for the gap between what people say and what they mean. It is also a small piece of Nick’s education in the chapter: he began the funeral arrangements believing that the household’s intimates would rally, and each call teaches him otherwise. Klipspringer’s tone teaches him fastest, because it is the tone of a man volunteering for a duty and disqualifying himself from it in the same breath. Nick’s suspicion is immediately confirmed when he presses, “Of course you’ll be there yourself,” and gets the Greenwich picnic. The sentence marks the exact moment hope dies in the conversation.

What is the significance of the Greenwich picnic excuse?

The excuse is a masterpiece of vague self-exoneration, and each of its phrases is doing comic and moral work. “Some people up here in Greenwich” is geography as fog: close enough to be plausible, vague enough to be unverifiable, with “some people” standing where names should be. “They rather expect me to be with them tomorrow” converts a weak social obligation into a chain, as if the expectations of unnamed people outweigh the funeral of the man who housed him for months. “There’s a sort of picnic or something” is the crown jewel: the “or something” dissolves the picnic into pure hypothesis even as he cites it as a barrier, so he is missing a funeral for an event he cannot commit to describing. “Of course I’ll do my very best to get away” promises nothing with maximum effort. The significance is that Fitzgerald lets the excuse be transparent. A better liar would be harder to judge. Klipspringer’s excuse is so thin that the reader sees through it while it is still being spoken, and the seeing-through is the judgment.

Why does Klipspringer call about his tennis shoes?

Because the shoes are the real purpose of the call and the funeral was the pretext. After hedging about attending, Klipspringer pivots with the sentence that reclassifies the entire conversation: “What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if it’d be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You see, they’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them.” He does not ask to collect them, which would bring his body back to the house; he asks the dead man’s butler to mail them to Greenwich, keeping his own body safely elsewhere. The “you see” assumes Nick shares his scale of values, as if tennis shoes constitute an emergency. The “sort of helpless” is the precise register of the chronic dependent, for whom helplessness is not a crisis but a lifestyle. He calls because Gatsby’s death has created an administrative opening: new management, and he wants his property forwarded. Death, for Klipspringer, is a change of management.

Why does Klipspringer ask the butler to send the shoes instead of coming back for them?

Because returning to the house would mean facing what the house has become: a place of grief, with a funeral to attend and a debt to acknowledge. Having the butler send the shoes lets him extract the last benefit of the household without paying the last cost of it, which is presence. The request is also a final assertion of the old arrangement: in Klipspringer’s mind, the mansion still has staff whose job includes serving him, and death has not updated his understanding. There is a colder reading, too. If he came back for the shoes, he would have to walk past the rooms where he lived rent free, past the piano he played badly, past Nick, who has just heard him wriggle out of the funeral. The mailed shoes avoid all of that. They convert the relationship into pure logistics, a forwarding address and a parcel, which is what the relationship always was for him. He just never said so until the telephone call.

Why does Nick hang up on Klipspringer?

Nick hangs up because the call has crossed the line from disappointment into obscenity, and he will not listen to the rest. Klipspringer has just finished explaining that he is sort of helpless without his tennis shoes and begun giving a forwarding address, “My address is care of B. F.,” when Nick ends it: “I didn’t hear the rest of the name, because I hung up the receiver.” The hang-up is the chapter’s only satisfying sound, and it is doing triple work. It is grief, the refusal to let the funeral arrangements share airtime with footwear. It is judgment, the verdict on months of freeloading delivered in a single click. And it is mercy, toward Gatsby, whose shame Nick feels on his behalf: “After that I felt a certain shame for Gatsby.” Nick hangs up not in anger but in protection, shielding the dead man from one more second of the living man’s smallness. The receiver going down is Nick’s final service as a friend, performed against a man who never understood what the word meant.

Appendix B

klipspringer	what-does-the-name-ewing-klipspringer-suggest-about-him # What does the name Ewing Klipspringer suggest about him?
klipspringer	how-does-nick-introduce-klipspringer-as-the-boarder # How does Nick introduce Klipspringer as “the boarder”?
klipspringer	what-does-klipspringer-wear-when-he-plays-the-piano-in-chapter-5 # What does Klipspringer wear when he plays the piano in Chapter 5?
klipspringer	what-two-songs-does-klipspringer-play-in-chapter-5 # What two songs does Klipspringer play in Chapter 5?
klipspringer	why-does-gatsby-tell-klipspringer-to-stop-talking-and-play # Why does Gatsby tell Klipspringer to stop talking and play?
klipspringer	how-long-has-klipspringer-been-living-at-gatsbys-house # How long has Klipspringer been living at Gatsby’s house?
klipspringer	how-does-klipspringers-telephone-manner-reveal-his-character # How does Klipspringer’s telephone manner reveal his character?
klipspringer	what-does-nick-mean-when-he-says-klipspringers-tone-made-him-suspicious # What does Nick mean when he says Klipspringer’s tone made him suspicious?
klipspringer	why-does-nick-hang-up-on-klipspringer # Why does Nick hang up on Klipspringer?
klipspringer	why-does-klipspringer-ask-the-butler-to-send-the-shoes-instead-of-coming-back-for-them # Why does Klipspringer ask the butler to send the shoes instead of coming back for them?
klipspringer	what-is-the-significance-of-the-greenwich-picnic-excuse # What is the significance of the Greenwich picnic excuse?
klipspringer	how-does-klipspringer-differ-from-owl-eyes # How does Klipspringer differ from Owl Eyes?
klipspringer	why-does-fitzgerald-give-klipspringer-no-backstory # Why does Fitzgerald give Klipspringer no backstory?
klipspringer	why-is-klipspringer-called-a-boarder-instead-of-a-guest # Why is Klipspringer called a boarder instead of a guest?