Some weeks later Nick finally gets the opportunity to meet his mysterious neighbor Mr. Gatsby. Gatsby gives huge parties, complete with catered food, open bars, and orchestras. People come from everywhere to attend these parties, but no one seems to know much about the host. Legends about Jay Gatsby abound. Some say he was a German spy during the war, others, that he once killed a man. Nick becomes fascinated by Gatsby. He begins watching his host and notices that Gatsby does not drink or join in the revelry of his own parties.
One day Gatsby and Nick drive to New York together. Gatsby tells Nick that he’s from a wealthy family in the Midwest, that he was educated at Oxford, and that he won war medals from many European countries. Nick isn’t sure what to believe. At lunch Gatsby introduces Nick to his business associate, Meyer Wolfsheim, “the man who fixed the World Series in 1919.”
At tea that afternoon Nick finds out from Jordan Baker why Gatsby has taken such an interest in him: Gatsby is in love with Daisy Buchanan and wants Nick to arrange a meeting between them. It seems that Gatsby, as a young officer at Camp Taylor in 1917, had fallen in love with Daisy, then Daisy Fay. He had been sent overseas, and she had eventually given him up, married Tom Buchanan, and had a daughter. When Gatsby finally returned from Europe he decided to win Daisy back. His first step was to buy a house in West Egg. From here he could look across the bay to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He expected her to turn up at one of his parties, and when she didn’t, he asked Jordan to ask Nick to ask Daisy. And so Nick does.
A few days later, in the rain, Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first time in five years. Gatsby is at first terrified, then tremendously excited. He takes Nick and Daisy on a tour of his house and grounds and shows them all his possessions, even his beautiful shirts from England. He shows Daisy the green light that he has been watching, and he insists that Klipspringer, “the boarder,” play the piano for them. Klipspringer plays “Ain’t We Got Fun,” and Nick leaves.
Now, halfway through the book, Nick gives us some information about who Gatsby really is. He was originally James Gatz, the son of farm people from North Dakota. He had gone to St. Olaf College in Minnesota, dropped out because the college failed to promote his romantic dreams about himself, and ended up on the south shore of Lake Superior earning room and board by digging clams and fishing for salmon. One day he saw the beautiful yacht of the millionaire Dan Cody and borrowed a rowboat to warn Cody of an impending storm. Cody took the seventeen-year-old boy on as steward, mate, and secretary. When Cody died, he left the boy, now Jay Gatsby, a legacy of $25,000, which the boy never got because of the jealousy of Cody’s mistress.
The story of Gatsby’s past breaks off, and Nick resumes his narration of Gatsby’s renewed courtship of Daisy during the summer of 1929. Daisy and Tom come to one of Gatsby’s parties, but Tom is put off by the vulgarity of Gatsby’s world, and Daisy does not have a good time. Though Gatsby has been seeing Daisy, he’s increasingly frustrated by his inability to recreate the magic of their time together in Louisville five years before.
The affair between Daisy and Gatsby now comes out into the open. Tom, Daisy, Gatsby, Nick, and Jordan–the five major characters–all meet for lunch at the Buchanans and then decide to drive to New York. Daisy and Gatsby end up going together in the Buchanans’ blue coupe, Tom, Nick, and Jordan drive in Gatsby’s yellow Rolls Royce. The couple stop for gas at Wilson’s garage, and Myrtle Wilson, watching from her window over the garage, thinks the car belongs to Tom.
The five arrive in the city and engage the parlor of a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Tom, drunk and agitated by now, starts ragging Gatsby about his past and attacking him for his phony English habit of calling people “old sport.” Gatsby retaliates by telling Tom that Daisy is going to leave him. Tom calls Gatsby a cheap bootlegger. Like cowboys in the Old West, they duel back and forth for Daisy until Tom wins. Daisy will not go away with Gatsby, and the five-year dream is over. Tom sends Daisy and Gatsby home together in the yellow Rolls Royce, knowing that he has nothing more to fear. A couple of hours later Tom follows with Nick and Jordan. When they reach the valley of ashes, they see crowds of people in police cars. Someone was struck by a car coming from New York. That someone, they discover, was Myrtle Wilson, and the car had to be Gatsby’s yellow Rolls Royce. When Nick gets back to East Egg, he finds Gatsby hiding in the shrubbery outside the Buchanans’ house, unwilling to leave for fear that Tom might hurt Daisy. Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was driving, but that–of course–he will take the blame. Nick leaves Gatsby “watching over nothing.”
Nick goes to work the next morning, but is too worried about Gatsby to stay in New York. He takes an early train back to West Egg but arrives at Gatsby’s too late. His friend’s body is floating on an inflated mattress in the swimming pool, and George Wilson’s dead body, revolver in hand, lies nearby on the grass. The crazed husband had spent the entire morning tracking down the driver of the yellow Rolls Royce. He found Gatsby before Nick did.
Nick tries to phone Daisy and Tom, but is told they’ve left town with no forwarding address. Calls to Meyer Wolfsheim produce similar results. Nick, it seems, is Gatsby’s only friend.
News of Gatsby’s murder is printed in a Chicago newspaper, where it is read by his father, Mr. Henry C. Gatz, now of Minnesota. Mr. Gatz arrives for the funeral, which is attended only by Nick, Owl Eyes (who loved Gatsby’s books), and a smattering of servants. Meyer Wolfsheim, of course, has refused to get involved. Even Mr. Klipspringer, “the boarder,” has sent his excuses.
Mr. Gatz, who loves his son very much, shows Nick a book which Jimmy owned as a boy. In the flyleaf Gatsby had written a schedule for self improvement: exercise, study, sport, and work. How far Gatsby had come from that dream, to this meaningless death!
Disgusted and disillusioned by what he has experienced, Nick decides to leave New York and return to the Midwest. He ends his relationship with Jordan Baker and learns from Tom Buchanan that it was he, Tom, who told Wilson where Gatsby lived. Before Nick leaves the East, he stands one more time on the beach near Gatsby’s house looking out at the green light that his friend had worshipped. Here he pays his final tribute to Gatsby and to the dream for which he lived–and died.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: NICK CARRAWAY
Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby; he is also a character in the novel. When you think about him, you have to think about what Fitzgerald is using him for. You also have to look at him as a person.
Nick, is first of all, Fitzgerald’s means of making his story more realistic. Because Nick is experiencing events and telling us about them in his own words, we’re more likely to believe the story. After a while we almost begin to experience the events as Nick does; the I of each of us as readers replaces the I of Nick. (For more details, see “Point of View.”)
Nick is a narrator whose values you should have no trouble identifying or at least sympathizing with. He’s not mad or blind to what’s going on around him. He’s a pretty solid young man who has graduated from Yale University, served his country in the First World War, and decided to go into the bond business. He comes from a solid Midwestern family, from whom he has learned some pretty basic values. He is honest, but not Puritanical or narrow minded. He is tolerant, understanding, and not hasty to judge people. He is the sort of person you might talk to if you wanted a sympathetic ear. But his toleration has limits. He doesn’t approve of everything.
These are some of the qualities that make Nick a reliable narrator, someone whose story we are likely to believe. It seems often that his values are pretty close to those of the author.
Nick is in a perfect position to tell the story. He is a cousin of Daisy Buchanan’s, he was in the same senior society as Tom Buchanan at Yale, and he has rented, during the summer of 1922, a house right next to Jay Gatsby. He knows all the characters well enough to be present at the crucial scenes in the novel. The information he doesn’t have but needs in order to tell his story, he gets from other characters like Jordan Baker, the Greek restaurant owner Michaelis, and Gatsby himself. Nick knows things because people confess to him, and people confess to him because he is tolerant, understanding, and sympathetic.
Nick has that capacity, which Fitzgerald felt was so terribly important (see The Author and His Times), of holding two contradictory opinions at the same time. He both admires Gatsby and disapproves of him. He admires Gatsby both because of his dream and because of his basic innocence; and he disapproves of Gatsby for his vulgar materialism and his corrupt business practices. (Nick does not want to become involved with Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s underworld “connection.”)
One of the things that makes Nick special is that he understands Gatsby. Nobody else in the novel-not even Daisy-really understands him. Nick is, at the novel’s end, Gatsby’s only friend, even though he disapproves of many things which Gatsby stands for. Almost nobody comes to Gatsby’s funeral, and if it weren’t for Nick, there would probably not even have been a funeral. Would you have gone?
Some readers think Nick is too sympathetic to Gatsby. They think that Nick ought to be mature enough to see what is wrong with Gatsby’s dream. They feel that Nick should be more critical of Gatsby, and force us as readers to be more critical, too. They believe that Nick in the closing pages, is too sentimental and that his judgment is not as reliable as we might think. There’s no critical agreement on this issue, so you’ll have to make up your own minds as you read the book.
As you’re deciding about Nick’s powers of judgment–particularly in the opening and closing pages where he talks about himself–keep in mind that Nick is a Midwesterner and his values are colored by the values of the world in which he grew up.
Many readers have remarked that the novel is based on a contrast between the solid, traditional, conservative Midwest and the glamorous, glittering, fast-paced world of the East. Nick (like Scott Fitzgerald, his creator) is from Minnesota. He comes East to experience the new and exciting world of New York that is very different from Minneapolis-St. Paul. At the end, he chooses to leave the East and return to the Midwest. By that choice he seems to be saying to us that he has tried the East and found it missing something he needs: a basic set of values. So he goes home, where values still exist. Think about the two worlds–the Midwest and the East and what they represented for Nick (and by extension, Fitzgerald) and what they might represent for you.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: JAY GATSBY
The title of this novel is The Great Gatsby. If you like paradoxes, start with this one: he is neither great nor Gatsby (his real name was Gatz). He is a crook, a bootlegger who has involved himself with Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. He has committed crimes in order to buy the house he feels he needs to win the woman he loves, who happens to be another man’s wife. Thus a central question for us as readers is, why should we love such a man? Or, to put it in other word, what makes Gatsby great? Why, despite all these things, does Fitzgerald invite us to cry out with Nick, “‘They’re a rotten crowd’… ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’”?
We are asked to love Gatsby, even admire him to a point, because of his dream. That dream is what separates Gatsby from what Nick calls the “foul dust [that] floated in the wake of his dreams…” It is not merely what is known as the American Dream of Success–the belief that every man can rise to success no matter what his beginnings. It is a kind of romantic idealism, “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” Nick calls it. It is a belief in fairytales and princesses and happy endings, a faith that life can be special, remarkable, beautiful. Gatsby is not interested in power for its own sake or in money or prestige. What he wants is his dream, and that dream is embodied in Daisy. He must have her, and, as the novel’s epigraph on the title page suggests, he will do anything that is required in order to win her.
But dreams don’t always show on the outside. The Great Gatsby is a kind of mystery story with Gatsby as the mystery. Who is he? All the way through the novel people keep asking that question and answering it falsely. They answer it falsely because they aren’t really interested in who Gatsby is. They have heard things about him–that he killed a man, that he was a German spy in World War I–and they pass these bits of gossip on to other people. So the myth of Gatsby–the collection of false stories about him–hides the Gatsby that we come gradually to know through the efforts of Nick Carraway. Nick genuinely cares who Gatsby is, and in Chapters IV, VI, VIII, and IX he presents us with the story of Gatsby’s past as he has learned it from Jordan Baker, from Gatsby himself, and eventually, from Gatsby’s father.
No one else but Nick knows or understands Gatsby’s background except maybe his father and Owl Eyes–and they, significantly, are the only ones present at his funeral. Fitzgerald invites us to share Nick’s understanding of Gatsby as we read the novel. He makes us see behind the surface of the man who at first glance looks like a young roughneck. And he forces us to ask, as we finish the book, what this dream is that Gatsby has dedicated himself to. Is it a worthwhile dream? Is it our dream, too? Can we love Gatsby and be critical of his dream at the same time? Fitzgerald makes us ask these questions and then lets us find our own answers.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: TOM BUCHANAN
Tom Buchanan, Nick tells us, “had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven–a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.” He is also very wealthy, having brought a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest to Long Island. This double power–the size of his body and his bankroll–colors our feelings about Tom Buchanan.
Because he is both very strong and very rich, Tom is used to having his own way. Nick describes him as having “a rather hard mouth” and “two shining arrogant eyes.” When we first meet him in Chapter I, he reveals his crude belief in his own superiority by telling Nick that he has just read a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires. The book warns that if white people are not careful, the black races will rise up and overwhelm them. Tom clearly believes it.
Tom is having an affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of George Wilson, who runs a garage in the valley of ashes. Myrtle seems to have a dark sexual vitality that attracts Tom, and he keeps an apartment for her in New York, where he takes Nick in Chapter II. Here he again shows how little he thinks of anyone beside himself when he casually breaks Myrtle’s nose with the back of his hand, because she is shouting “Daisy! Daisy!” in a vulgar fashion.
Between Chapters II and VII we see little of Tom, but in Chapter VII he emerges as a central figure. It is Tom who pushes the affair between Gatsby and Daisy out into the open by asking Gatsby point blank, “‘What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyway?” It is Tom who verbally outduels Gatsby to win his wife back and deflate his rival’s dream. And it is Tom who, after the death of Myrtle Wilson, tells George Wilson that Gatsby was the killer and then hustles Daisy out of the area until the affair blows over.
Fitzgerald describes Tom and Daisy as careless people who break things and then retreat into their wealth and let other people clean up their messes. It’s a particularly apt metaphor for Tom, who cannot understand why Nick should have any ill feelings about Gatsby’s death. After all, Tom was only protecting his wife. Nick shakes hands with Tom in the final chapter because “…I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.” Yet Tom’s behavior was not justifiable, and when Nick refers to the “foul dust” that floated in the wake of Gatsby’s dream, he seems to be speaking of Tom Buchanan more than anyone else. It is Tom as much as anyone who sends Nick back to the Midwest, where there are still values one can believe in.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: DAISY FAY BUCHANAN
She was born Daisy Fay in Louisville, Kentucky, and her color is white. When Jordan Baker, in Chapter IV, tells Nick about the first meeting between Gatsby and Daisy in October 1917, she says of Daisy, “She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night.”
Throughout The Great Gatsby Daisy is described almost in fairytale language. The name Fay means “fairy” or “sprite.” “Daisy,” of course, suggests the flower, fresh and bright as spring, yet fragile and without the strength to resist the heat and dryness of summer.