Question

read the excerpt from the great gatsby. twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of long island sound. they were not perfect ovals—like the egg in the columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. to the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. i lived at west egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. the use of words such as “fashionable,” “superficial,” “bizarre,” and “sinister” provide a truthful and vivid description of the west egg and east egg. a sense of artificiality in the world the narrator finds himself in. an idea of mischief that surrounds the narrator and his friends a meaningful portrayal of life on the long island sound in the 1920s.

Explanation:

These words suggest a world that is not genuine. "Fashionable" implies a focus on surface - level status, "superficial" directly points to shallowness, "bizarre" indicates strangeness, and "sinister" gives an air of something menacing and not right. Together, they create a sense of artificiality in the narrator's environment.

Answer:

a sense of artificiality in the world the narrator finds himself in.