The Great Gatsby

What's inside (11 sections)

1. The two eggs and the green light
2. The parties nobody could explain
3. The reunion in the rain
4. James Gatz and Dan Cody
5. The afternoon at the Plaza
6. The yellow car
7. The funeral nobody attends
8. Nick's judgment
9. What does not work
10. Key takeaways
11. FAQ

I picked up The Great Gatsby expecting a novel about parties and got a novel about who turns up to a funeral. Fitzgerald published it in 1925 through Charles Scribner's Sons. It is short enough to finish in a weekend, which is half the reason it keeps getting passed around; the other half is that almost everybody arrives already knowing the green light, the shirts, and the last sentence about boats and the current. What surprised me was how dry and angry the book is under the glitter, and how much of it rests on one narrator who judges everyone in the story two years after the fact, himself included.

The two eggs and the green light

Nick Carraway, a Yale man from Minnesota who went into bonds after the war, rents a small house in West Egg in the summer of 1922. His father has given him a rule he repeats early: whenever you feel like criticizing someone, remember that not everyone has had your advantages. It is sound advice, and Nick applies it about half the time.

Next door stands the biggest house in the neighborhood, with a tower and a lawn running down to the water, owned by a man named Jay Gatsby, who throws enormous parties and never seems to attend them himself. Across the bay in East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan, an old acquaintance from Yale, broad, loud, and already keeping a mistress in New York. At dinner Nick meets Jordan Baker, a golf champion whose bored manner covers more than she says, and he watches the Buchanans long enough to see the shape of their marriage: Tom's casual cruelty, Daisy's voice that Gatsby will later say is full of money, and Daisy's hope that her little girl grows up to be a beautiful little fool.

The evening ends on the lawn with Nick noticing Gatsby down the shore, stretching his arms out toward a single green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He does not know yet that the light belongs to her. That is the book's first real stroke: we see the gesture before we know what it means, and by the time we understand it, the gesture has already become the whole story.

Later the same summer, Nick drives with Jordan through the Valley of Ashes, the gray dumping ground between Long Island and New York where George Wilson's garage sits under the painted eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. Wilson is washed out and deferential. His wife Myrtle keeps an apartment in the city and an arrangement with Tom, and her confidence in him is total.

The parties nobody could explain

The first party Nick attends is told almost entirely through strangers. Women in evening dress drift out to the water, an orchestra plays, champagne comes in glasses bigger than finger bowls, and nobody can say much about the host beyond rumor. One girl whispers that somebody told her he killed a man once. Another argues he was more likely a German spy, and the first girl points out that cannot be right because he was in the American army. The party is inventing him in real time.

Gatsby himself stands apart, not drinking, watching the crowd with a correctness that makes him seem slightly ridiculous and slightly magnetic at once. He finds Nick in the crush, and when Nick admits he was invited by chauffeur and has never met the host, Gatsby says only that he is Gatsby and that he is afraid he is not a very good host. In the library, an owl-eyed man has already checked the leather-bound books and reports that they are real, with pages and everything, having assumed they were cardboard props, and treats the find as a small triumph.

Two things matter later: Gatsby wants a result rather than company, and Nick's trust in him is forming on very little evidence.

Gatsby picks Nick up in the cream-colored car and they lunch in a cellar on Forty-Second Street with Meyer Wolfshiem, a gambler who makes Nick uneasy. Over the meal Gatsby adds, as if it were a small piece of news, that Wolfshiem is the man who fixed the World's Series in 1919. Then comes the real request, delivered through Jordan: Gatsby would like Nick to invite Daisy to tea so that he can happen to come over. He has waited five years, bought a house, and thrown all these parties for a woman who lives across the water and has never walked through his door. The modesty of the ask is the strangest thing about him.

The reunion in the rain

Gatsby is a wreck before the tea. He nearly cancels, sends flowers, arrives in the pouring rain twenty minutes early, knocks a useless clock off the mantelpiece, and stands looking around Nick's cottage as if measuring how little it contains. Daisy nearly cancels too. Then the rain stops, the sun comes out, and she sees him.

Fitzgerald handles the scene with real restraint. There is no big confession. There is awkwardness, a walk outside, and then Gatsby showing Daisy his shirts, throwing them down in piles of silk and linen until she buries her face in them and cries. It sounds absurd written down and works on the page, because the shirts are proof of five years spent becoming someone who could stand in front of her without shame.

On the way back Nick passes the green light again and thinks that its colossal meaning may already be gone from Gatsby's imagination, now that the woman it pointed at is in the room. The dream survives by getting bigger: Gatsby wants the past rewritten, and he starts insisting that a man can repeat the whole of his past.

James Gatz and Dan Cody

Chapter six stops the plot to tell you who Gatsby actually is, and it is the best section in the book. He was born James Gatz to shiftless farming people in North Dakota. At seventeen he rowed out to a passing yacht belonging to Dan Cody, a copper millionaire, and reinvented himself on the spot, taking the name Jay Gatsby. Cody kept him close for five years and died a week after a newspaper woman named Ella Kaye came aboard; Gatsby inherited twenty-five thousand dollars on paper and never saw it.

Gatsby tells this story to Nick the way you would tell a confession, without self-pity, and then immediately goes back to Daisy. Fitzgerald gives us a man who built a self out of practice. His boyhood schedule, which turns up later in his father's wallet, is all self-improvement and saving three dollars a week. The tragedy is that Gatsby completed the schedule and still had nothing he wanted.

That same weekend he brings Daisy to one of his parties, and she hates it. She wants the money and not the spectacle, Tom sneers at the whole evening, and Gatsby's dream strains against the reality of the woman it was built for. When Tom later asks where Gatsby got his money, the answer is going to be ugly, and both of them know it.

The afternoon at the Plaza

The heat in chapter seven does most of the work. Gatsby has fired his servants to stop the gossip. Daisy wants to go to town. Tom insists on driving Gatsby's yellow car with Nick and Jordan while Daisy follows with Gatsby in Tom's blue coupe, a detail that will decide who kills Myrtle Wilson and who walks away.

At Wilson's garage on the way, Myrtle stares down from the window with sick jealousy at Jordan, whom she takes to be Tom's wife, and Wilson announces that he is taking his wife west whether she likes it or not. Both men are losing control in the same hour and neither can see it.

At the Plaza, over whiskey in a stifling parlor, Tom goes after Gatsby directly. He mocks old sport as a borrowed phrase, presses Gatsby on when exactly he was at Oxford, and calls him a bootlegger in front of Daisy. Gatsby, who has been waiting five years for this, finally says the thing out loud: Daisy never loved Tom, she only married him because Gatsby was poor. Tom does not argue much. He simply asks Daisy to answer, and Daisy, who meant to say the words, can only manage that she loved Gatsby once, years ago, and cannot swear she never loved her husband at all.

That half sentence kills Gatsby. He has asked for a total, and she offers a portion, and the difference between the two is the whole novel. Tom sees the opening and tells them to go home together in Gatsby's car, satisfied now, with his wife back and his rival destroyed.

The yellow car

Daisy is driving. Myrtle runs out into the road, likely taking the car for Tom's, and is struck so hard that the car does not stop. Nick, Jordan, and Tom arrive on foot to find Wilson standing in the doorway groaning and Myrtle's body on a work table under a yellow light. Tom looks at her for a moment, then lies to Wilson about the car, saying he never saw it that afternoon, and later admits to Nick on Fifth Avenue that he told Wilson who owned the yellow car because Wilson had a gun and would not have left otherwise.

Wilson spends the night in the garage with the dog leash Myrtle had hidden in a drawer, staring at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg until he decides the billboard is God and that the man in the car murdered his wife. Michaelis, the Greek who runs the diner, sits with him and gets nowhere.

Across the bay, Gatsby spends the night watching the Buchanans' house from the shrubbery. He tells Nick afterward that he waited, and that at about four in the morning Daisy came to her window for a minute and then turned out the light, which is the closest thing to a message he gets. In the morning he says he will claim he was driving, which is the one thing he can still give her, and then goes out to the pool he has not used all summer because the gardener wants to drain it before the leaves fall. The chauffeur hears the shots and does not think much of them. Wilson has walked to West Egg, shot Gatsby at the edge of the pool, and then shot himself in the grass a little way off.

The funeral nobody attends

What happens next is the meanest part of the book. Nick telephones everyone he can think of. Daisy and Tom have left town with no address and no message. Wolfshiem writes back that he cannot get mixed up in it and asks to be told about the funeral. Klipspringer, who practically lives at the mansion, calls only to ask the butler to forward his tennis shoes, because he is at a picnic in Greenwich. One guest implies Gatsby got what he deserved.

What he got was a procession of three cars in the drizzle: the hearse, then Nick, Gatsby's father and a Lutheran minister in the limousine, and the servants and the West Egg postman in the station wagon. Henry C. Gatz arrives from Minnesota with a cracked photograph of the house and a boyhood schedule in a copy of Hopalong Cassidy, proud and baffled by rooms he does not fit into. At the cemetery gate a single man shows up, the owl-eyed reader from the library, who looks around and says they used to come there by the hundreds. Then he takes off his glasses, wipes them, and calls Gatsby the poor son-of-a-bitch. Daisy sends no flower and no note.

Nick's judgment

Nick is not a neutral camera and the book never pretends otherwise. He rides out with Tom to the apartment in New York and never tells Daisy a word of it, he forgives Gatsby's fraud because Gatsby is hopeful while the Buchanans are merely careless, and he tells Gatsby, across the lawn, that he is worth the whole crowd put together. He also insists he is one of the few honest people he knows, which is the sort of sentence an honest man would not usually write.

His real subject is East Egg old money. When he finally meets Tom after the killing, Tom is unbothered, convinced he did the right thing, and Nick realizes that arguing would be like talking to a child. His conclusion is famous for a reason: they are careless people who smash up things and creatures, retreat into their money, and leave other people to clean up the mess, and that verdict lands harder after a funeral where nobody came.

Jordan gets her own closing scene, cool and a little wounded, telling Nick she is engaged to another man and joking about bad drivers meeting other bad drivers. Nick goes back to the Midwest instead of staying in the East, and the last paragraphs move from his childhood trains to the island before the houses, and then to Gatsby reaching for the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. The final line, about boats beating against the current and being borne back into the past, is the one everybody quotes, and after the funeral it does not read as comforting. It reads as a description of a man who spent five years trying to repeat a week in Louisville.

What does not work

For all its reputation, the book has clear weak spots. Gatsby is more symbol than person. We almost never get inside his head, because Nick can only report what he saw, and the result is a hero made of gestures: the shirts, the smile, the arms out over the water. When the plot needs him to be a criminal, the details arrive secondhand and are dropped once the Plaza scene is over.

Jordan suffers more. Her golf scandal, the suggestion that she moved her ball in a semi-final, gets a couple of paragraphs and is never paid off, and her romance with Nick evaporates without a scene that earns it. Daisy is even thinner at times, less a woman than a voice and a set of privileges, which is partly the point and partly a way of avoiding her.

The mythologizing can also tire. The library books, the schedule, the platonic conception of himself: Fitzgerald keeps handing Gatsby a new emblem. And the structure leans on coincidence, with Wilson finding his target in the hours the narrative needs him to. People who dislike symbolic prose or who want a central character to argue with should know that this is closer to a fable about money than a novel about friendship, and that the last twenty pages are the reason the rest of them are taught.

FAQ

Who was driving the car that killed Myrtle Wilson?

Daisy was at the wheel of Gatsby's yellow car with Gatsby beside her, and he offers later to say he was driving. Tom had his own blue coupe and arrived on foot with Nick and Jordan.

Why does almost nobody come to Gatsby's funeral?

The party guests have scattered, Wolfshiem writes that he will not get mixed up in it, and Klipspringer only phones about his tennis shoes. Daisy and Tom leave town with no address, so only Gatsby's father, the servants, and the owl-eyed man from the library show up.

What is the green light at the end of the book?

It is the light on Daisy's dock across the bay, which Gatsby reaches toward in the first pages. In the last paragraphs it stands for the future he wanted, which recedes the faster he runs at it.