Hi!
In paragraph 2, Fitzgerald personifies the Georgia city as sleeping because this suggests that nothing lively has really ever occured in the city.
Fitzgerald starts his first paragraph by describing the character Jim as boring. He uses words like "bred-in-the-bone" and "dyed-in-the-wool" which depict him as a dull chacter. Then he proceeds to describes his hometown and he refers to it as "a place that has been "sleepily" for "forty thousand years". With all this context in consideration, it's easy to infer that Fitzgerald is describing the city as boring and uneventful as Jim.
Therefore, the answer is C, "nothing lively has really ever occurred in the city".
