The Great Gatsby

This is the novel that defined the American Dream's dark side: wealth as a costume, love as a fantasy, and the past as a current you can't swim against. Read it for the prose—Fitzgerald makes a green light and a valley of ashes feel like verdicts. It's for anyone who has ever chased a person, a city, or a version of themselves that stopped existing years ago.

1. 1

   Act 1

   The Neighbor Who Never Joins His Own Parties

   Spring 1922. Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and war veteran from the Midwest, lands in New York to sell bonds and rents a small bungalow in West Egg, Long Island—next door to a Gothic mansion owned by Jay Gatsby, a millionaire famous for parties he never attends. Across the bay in East Egg, Nick dines with his second cousin once removed, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband Tom, a former Yale football star Nick knew in college, recently arrived from Chicago. There he meets Jordan Baker, a professional golfer and Daisy's friend, who tells him Tom keeps a mistress—a woman bold enough to telephone the house. Driving home that night, Nick sees Gatsby alone on his lawn, arms stretched toward a single green light burning across the water at the end of Daisy's dock. Soon after, Tom drags Nick by train to the valley of ashes, a desolate dumping ground between West Egg and the city, and stops at a garage where Tom's mistress, Myrtle—wife of mechanic George Wilson—joins them. In a small apartment Tom keeps for their trysts, a party sours when Myrtle shouts Daisy's name; Tom slaps her and breaks her nose. Then a formal invitation arrives: Nick is summoned to Gatsby's. Feeling like the only stranger there, he drinks heavily until he finds Jordan—and a man introduces himself as Gatsby, noting they both served in the 3rd Infantry Division. "Old sport," he calls Nick, and keeps calling him that.

2. 2

   Act 2

   The Man Invented Himself

   Gatsby takes Nick to lunch in the city and spins a past too polished to believe: an Oxford man, a decorated war hero. He also introduces Nick to Meyer Wolfsheim, a gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series—a glimpse of where the money really comes from. Later, Jordan tells Nick the truth Gatsby can't: in 1917, in Louisville, a young officer named Gatsby fell in love with Daisy at Camp Taylor; while he was overseas, she married Tom. Everything since—the mansion, the parties—was built to be across the bay from her, in the hope that his new wealth would win her back. Now he wants Nick to arrange a reunion. Nick invites Daisy to his bungalow for tea. Gatsby arrives nervous enough to knock over a clock; the reunion is agonizing, then warm, and the affair reignites. He walks Daisy through his mansion and, in a gesture that says everything, hurls his shirts onto the table until she weeps into them—"I've never seen such beautiful shirts." She cries because the man she waited for is real, rich, and five years late. Gatsby tells Nick her voice is "full of money," and the green light loses its magic now that she stands beside him. What he wanted was never her; it was the boy who wanted her.

3. 3

   Act 3

   The Hot Day Everything Breaks

   On a brutally hot afternoon, Daisy addresses Gatsby with such open intimacy in front of Tom that the affair is out. Tom forces the confrontation to a suite at the Plaza Hotel, where Gatsby demands Daisy declare she never loved Tom. She can't: "I did love him once—but I loved you too." Tom then reveals Gatsby is a bootlegger, his fortune built on illegal liquor, and Daisy's courage drains away. She chooses Tom. Tom, knowing he's won, scornfully orders Gatsby to drive her home in the yellow car. On the way back through the valley of ashes, Myrtle Wilson runs into the road—she believes Tom is driving—and the car strikes and kills her instantly. Daisy was at the wheel. Gatsby hides the car and tells Nick he'll take the blame to protect Daisy; Nick urges him to flee, but Gatsby refuses and instead waits outside Daisy's house like a sentinel. Inside, Nick watches Tom and Daisy conspire over cold chicken and ale and understands they are careless people who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money." Tom, meanwhile, tells George Wilson that Gatsby owned the death car. Wilson, believing Gatsby was both the driver and Myrtle's lover, walks to the mansion with a gun.

4. 4

   Act 4

   The Funeral Almost No One Attends

   George Wilson finds Gatsby floating in his swimming pool and shoots him dead, then kills himself. The dream dies in the water it was built beside. Nick, left to handle everything, struggles to arrange a funeral; the guests who feasted on Gatsby's liquor vanish. Only Nick, Gatsby's father Henry Gatz, Owl Eyes, and a few servants show up. Henry Gatz brings a copy of Hopalong Cassidy where young Jimmy Gatz—a poor boy from North Dakota who renamed himself at seventeen after meeting the wealthy Dan Cody—had written a daily schedule of self-improvement. The boy planned his way into a legend and the legend got him killed. Before leaving, Nick confronts Tom in New York; Tom admits he told Wilson who owned the car, and Nick refuses his handshake at first. Disillusioned with the East's moral rot, Nick concludes that Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and he were all Midwesterners unsuited to Eastern life, and goes home. One last time he walks the overgrown lawn of the abandoned mansion and stares at the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, thinking of Gatsby, who "believed in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us." Then the closing line, the one that follows you out the door: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

• NNick CarrawayMidwestern bond salesman, war veteran, and our narrator, renting next door to Gatsby. He wants an honest vantage on the East and instead becomes the only person loyal enough to bury its most famous casualty.
• JJay GatsbyBorn James Gatz, a poor North Dakota boy who reinvented himself into a millionaire bootlegger to win back Daisy. He dies in his pool, taking the blame for a death she caused.
• DDaisy BuchananNick's cousin, a Louisville debutante whose voice is "full of money." She rekindles her love for Gatsby, then retreats to Tom's protection the moment it costs anything.
• TTom BuchananDaisy's husband, an imposing ex-Yahoo football star with a mistress and a talent for cruelty. He exposes Gatsby's crime and points Wilson at him, then retires unscathed into his money.
• JJordan BakerA cool, insolent professional golfer with a cheating rumor trailing her. She tells Nick Gatsby's story, briefly becomes his girlfriend, and drifts away as the illusion collapses.
• MMyrtle WilsonTom's mistress, desperate to escape her marriage to a garage mechanic. She runs toward a car she thinks Tom is driving and dies under Daisy's wheels.
• GGeorge WilsonMyrtle's pale, worn-down husband, whom Tom calls too dumb to know he's alive. Grief and Tom's lie turn him into Gatsby's killer—and his own.

The green light

At the end of Daisy's dock, it burns for Gatsby as the future he can almost touch. Once Daisy is beside him, its magic fades—possessing the dream kills the longing that made it glow. When Nick stares at it last, it has widened into the future all of us chase and can't reach.

The valley of ashes

The dumping ground between West Egg and New York, where the poor like George and Myrtle Wilson live among industrial waste. Every pleasure in the novel is purchased at the expense of this place—and it's where the dream literally runs someone down.

Gatsby's shirts

Daisy sobs into the mountain of imported shirts because beauty and abundance arrive five years too late. The shirts stand for everything Gatsby built to prove himself—gorgeous, abundant, and finally just fabric to cry on.

Gatsby's mansion and parties

A palace built as a beacon, filled with strangers who drink his liquor and never learn his name. Its fate mirrors his: lit and crowded while he lives, abandoned and weedy within days of his death.

The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg

A fading optician's billboard looming over the valley of ashes, staring blankly at the moral wreckage below. George Wilson mistakes it for God's watchful eyes—the only god this world has left is an advertisement.

The ending refuses consolation. Gatsby dies for Daisy's crime, and Daisy doesn't send flowers—she and Tom simply close ranks, and their world closes over the hole like water. Nick's final act is to walk the empty lawn and translate one man's obsession into everyone's condition: the green light becomes the "orgastic future" we all pursue, and the closing line turns the whole country into boats rowing against a current that only runs backward. Read one way, it's an elegy for a decent dreamer destroyed by the careless rich. Read another, it's an indictment of Gatsby too—his dream was never Daisy but a fantasy of who he could be, and that fantasy was worth more to him than his life. It lands because Nick doesn't resolve it; he just keeps rowing, and so do we.

1. 1.Is Gatsby 'great'—a romantic idealist in a corrupt world—or a con man whose fantasy destroys everyone near him? Argue both from his reinvention and his final loyalty to Daisy.
2. 2.Compare Tom and Gatsby as two versions of American masculinity and money: inherited entitlement versus self-made crime. Why does Daisy choose Tom, and what does her choice say about class?
3. 3.Nick claims to be honest and reserved, yet he arranges the affair, judges everyone, and edits the whole story. How reliable is a narrator who despises the people he can't stop watching?

Anyone who has chased something—or someone—that existed only in the past. Readers who want gorgeous prose, moral ambiguity, and the novel that set the standard for the American Dream story.

FAQ