By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jazz Age wealth and doomed love
Subject
Themes
In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway moves from the American Midwest to a modest bungalow on Long Island's West Egg, next door to a colossal mansion owned by the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a brutish former football star from an enormously wealthy family. Tom is conducting an open affair with Myrtle Wilson, the vital, ambitious wife of a spiritless garage owner in the desolate valley of ashes that lies between the Eggs and New York.
In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway moves from the American Midwest to a modest bungalow on Long Island's West Egg, next door to a colossal mansion owned by the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a brutish former…
The narrative is set in 1922, three years after the end of the Great War and two years into the Prohibition era, a period of dramatic social and economic transformation in the United States. Understanding this context is essential to grasping why the characters behave as they do and why their world…
The promise of self-reinvention lies at the heart of American national mythology: anyone, regardless of origin, can become anything through determination and hard work. Jay Gatsby embodies this promise more completely than any other character in twentieth-century fiction. Born James Gatz to…
Nick Carraway's most devastating verdict falls in the final pages: Tom and Daisy are "careless people" who smash up things and creatures and then retreat into their money or their vast carelessness, letting other people clean up the mess they make. This observation serves as the moral centre of the…
When Nick tells Gatsby that he cannot repeat the past, Gatsby responds with genuine incredulity: "Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!" This exchange crystallises the novel's deepest preoccupation. Gatsby's entire existence is organised around the conviction that time is reversible, that…
Nearly every character constructs a public self that differs from their private reality, and the gap between performance and authenticity is one of the narrative's central concerns. Gatsby is the most extreme case, having invented himself entirely at seventeen, but he is far from alone. The novel is…
Romantic love is the engine that drives the plot, but the love depicted is rarely mutual, rarely honest, and rarely about the actual person being loved. Instead, love functions primarily as a form of possession, a way of claiming ownership over another person, and as a form of projection, a way of…
Jay Gatsby is one of literature's most compelling figures of self-invention. Born James Gatz to impoverished farm people in North Dakota, he rejects his origins utterly, creating a new identity at seventeen when he rows out to Dan Cody's yacht on Lake Superior. From that moment, Jay Gatsby exists as…
Nick Carraway occupies the peculiar position of being both the story's narrator and one of its most revealing subjects. A Yale graduate from a prominent Midwestern family, he moves to West Egg in the summer of 1922 to learn the bond business, renting a small bungalow next to Gatsby's enormous…
Daisy Buchanan is both the object of Gatsby's colossal dream and its ultimate disappointment, a woman whose charm lies precisely in her ability to promise more than she delivers. Her voice is her most striking feature, low and thrilling, full of a singing compulsion that men who have cared for her…
Tom Buchanan represents old money at its most brutal and unreflective. A former football star at Yale, he peaked at twenty-one and has spent the rest of his life trying to recapture the sense of dominance that came naturally on the playing field. He is physically imposing, with a cruel body capable…
Jordan Baker moves through the novel with a jaunty, self-contained grace that both attracts and unsettles Nick Carraway. A professional golfer and minor celebrity, she carries herself with an erect posture, throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey, sun-strained eyes…
Myrtle Wilson is the story's most vivid embodiment of thwarted aspiration. A woman of about thirty-five, thickish and faintly stout, she carries her surplus flesh sensuously, and there is an immediately perceptible vitality about her, as if the nerves of her body are continually smouldering. She…
In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway moves from the American Midwest to West Egg on Long Island, renting a modest bungalow next to an enormous mansion. A Yale graduate and veteran of the Great War, Nick has come east to learn the bond business. His small house sits between palatial estates, and his…
Halfway between West Egg and New York, the motor road runs alongside the railroad through a desolate stretch of land known as the valley of ashes. Grey dust coats everything here: houses, chimneys, the men who move dimly through the powdery air. Above this wasteland, the enormous faded eyes of an…
Through the summer nights, music drifts from the mansion next door. In Gatsby's blue gardens, men and women come and go like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. Every weekend, his Rolls-Royce becomes an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city. Crates of oranges arrive…
Late in July, Gatsby's gorgeous cream-coloured car pulls up to Nick's door with a burst of melody from its three-noted horn. Gatsby invites Nick to lunch in New York, and during the drive attempts to shape Nick's opinion of him. He claims to be the son of wealthy, now-deceased people from the Middle…
On the agreed day, rain pours down over West Egg. Gatsby has sent a man to cut Nick's grass and dispatched an entire greenhouse of flowers to the cottage. He arrives an hour before Daisy in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie, pale from sleeplessness, dark signs of exhaustion…
The truth about Gatsby's origins is far removed from the polished autobiography he delivered on the drive to New York. His real name is James Gatz, and he was born to shiftless, unsuccessful farm people in North Dakota. His imagination never accepted them as his parents. As a young man, he drifted…
Gatsby's parties abruptly cease. He has dismissed his servants and replaced them with associates of Wolfsheim's, people who will not gossip, because Daisy now visits his house regularly in the afternoons. The whole caravansary has fallen like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes. At Daisy's…
Nick cannot sleep. A foghorn groans incessantly on the Sound, and he tosses between grotesque reality and frightening dreams. Toward dawn he hears a taxi go up Gatsby's drive and crosses the lawn to find his neighbour leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection. "Nothing happened,"…
After Gatsby's death, Nick finds himself alone and responsible. Police, photographers, and newspaper men fill the mansion in an endless drill. The reports published the next morning are grotesque, circumstantial, and untrue. At the inquest, Catherine swears her sister Myrtle never knew Gatsby and…
Jay Gatsby is one of literature's most compelling figures of self-invention. Born James Gatz to impoverished farm people in North Dakota, he rejects his origins utterly, creating a new identity at seventeen when he rows out to Dan Cody's yacht on Lake Superior. From that moment, Jay Gatsby exists as…
Nick Carraway occupies the peculiar position of being both the story's narrator and one of its most revealing subjects. A Yale graduate from a prominent Midwestern family, he moves to West Egg in the summer of 1922 to learn the bond business, renting a small bungalow next to Gatsby's enormous…
Daisy Buchanan is both the object of Gatsby's colossal dream and its ultimate disappointment, a woman whose charm lies precisely in her ability to promise more than she delivers. Her voice is her most striking feature, low and thrilling, full of a singing compulsion that men who have cared for her…
Tom Buchanan represents old money at its most brutal and unreflective. A former football star at Yale, he peaked at twenty-one and has spent the rest of his life trying to recapture the sense of dominance that came naturally on the playing field. He is physically imposing, with a cruel body capable…
Jordan Baker moves through the novel with a jaunty, self-contained grace that both attracts and unsettles Nick Carraway. A professional golfer and minor celebrity, she carries herself with an erect posture, throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey, sun-strained eyes…
Myrtle Wilson is the story's most vivid embodiment of thwarted aspiration. A woman of about thirty-five, thickish and faintly stout, she carries her surplus flesh sensuously, and there is an immediately perceptible vitality about her, as if the nerves of her body are continually smouldering. She…
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Subject
Themes
In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway moves from the American Midwest to a modest bungalow on Long Island's West Egg, next door to a colossal mansion owned by the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a brutish former football star from an enormously wealthy family. Tom is conducting an open affair with Myrtle Wilson, the vital, ambitious wife of a spiritless garage owner in the desolate valley of ashes that lies between the Eggs and New York.