The Great Gatsby

Summary

The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner and war veteran who comes East in the spring of 1922 to learn the bond business and rents a small house in West Egg, on Long Island, beside the vast mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a rich former Yale football player, along with Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a champion golfer. On his first evening Nick learns that Tom has a mistress, and later he sees Gatsby alone on his lawn, stretching his arms toward a green light at the end of Daisy's dock. Tom takes Nick to meet the mistress, Myrtle Wilson, wife of a worn-out garage owner in the valley of ashes, a dumping ground watched over by the faded billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg; at a drunken party in a Manhattan apartment Tom breaks Myrtle's nose. Nick attends one of Gatsby's enormous parties, where guests trade rumors that their host killed a man or was a German spy. Gatsby, who calls everyone old sport, introduces Nick to the gambler Meyer Wolfshiem, the man said to have fixed the 1919 World Series. Through Jordan, Nick learns that Gatsby and Daisy loved each other in Louisville in 1917, before he went to war, and that he bought his house to be across the water from her. Nick arranges a tea where the two meet again; Gatsby shows Daisy his house and tosses his shirts before her, and their affair begins. In Chapter VI Nick reveals that Gatsby was born James Gatz to poor North Dakota farmers and reinvented himself at seventeen while working for the millionaire Dan Cody. On a stifling afternoon at the Plaza Hotel, Tom confronts Gatsby, exposes his fortune as bootlegging through drugstores, and Daisy cannot say she never loved Tom. Driving home in Gatsby's yellow car, Daisy strikes and kills Myrtle, who has run into the road; Gatsby resolves to take the blame. Tom tells the grieving George Wilson whose car it was, and Wilson shoots Gatsby in his swimming pool and then kills himself. The Buchanans leave town without a word. Almost no one comes to the funeral except Nick, Gatsby's father Henry C. Gatz, who proudly shows a boyhood schedule of self-improvement, and a guest Nick calls Owl Eyes. Disgusted with the East, Nick breaks with Jordan, refuses Tom's hand, and returns West, reflecting on Gatsby's hope and the Dutch sailors who first saw the green breast of the new world. Charles Scribner's Sons published the novel on 10 April 1925, with Francis Cugat's cover of eyes above a carnival skyline. It sold modestly in Fitzgerald's lifetime and became a standard American classic after the Second World War.

Top Lessons

• A dream fixed on the past

  Gatsby builds his whole life to recover one month in Louisville in 1917, and when Nick warns that the past cannot be repeated, Gatsby cries that of course it can. The novel shows how a love turned into an idol cannot survive contact with the living person, who is smaller than the dream.

• Careless wealth

  Tom and Daisy retreat into their money after Myrtle's death and leave others to pay. Fitzgerald separates the old money of East Egg from Gatsby's new money, but the deeper contrast is between people who take responsibility and those who do not.

• A narrator who judges

  Nick opens by claiming he reserves judgments, yet the novel is full of his verdicts. Reading Gatsby well means weighing Nick's witness: what he admires, what he hides about his own part, and why he is glad he told Gatsby he was worth the whole bunch.

• Self-invention and its limits

  James Gatz invents Jay Gatsby out of a boyhood schedule of exercise and study, Dan Cody's yacht and an Oxford term after the war. The novel honors his discipline and imagination while showing how much of the new self rests on lies and crime.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novel is not medical, but its world runs on Prohibition liquor. Tom says Gatsby and Wolfshiem bought up side-street drugstores and sold grain alcohol over the counter, which points to the period's real loophole: pharmacists could dispense alcohol for medicinal use on a physician's prescription, and drugstore chains were suspected of serving as fronts. Drinking shapes nearly every scene, from Myrtle's apartment party to Gatsby's lawns. George Wilson, already described as pale and sick, spends the night after Myrtle's death rocking and talking to Michaelis before killing Gatsby and himself, a portrait of grief turning into fixed resolve that should not be pressed into a modern diagnosis. Myrtle's death in the road is described with blunt physical detail. Tom's enthusiasm in Chapter I for a book about the threat of rising races by a writer he calls Goddard reflects the popular hereditarian writing of the early 1920s.

• Chapter II

  The drunken apartment party ends when Tom breaks Myrtle's nose with his open hand.

• Chapter VII

  Tom accuses Gatsby of selling grain alcohol over the counter through drugstores in New York and Chicago.

• Chapter VII

  Myrtle runs into the road and is killed by Gatsby's car; the scene at the garage and the body are described.

• Chapter VIII

  Wilson's night of grief with Michaelis, his fixation on the billboard eyes as the eyes of God, and the murder of Gatsby and Wilson's suicide.