THE GREAT GATSBY!!

Full Book Summary

➢ Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer of 1922 to learn
about the bond business. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a wealthy but
unfashionable area populated by the new rich, a group who have made their fortunes too recently to
have established social connections and who are prone to garish displays of wealth. Nick’s next-door
neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion
and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night.

Nick is unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he was educated at Yale and has social connections
in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper class. Nick drives out
to East Egg one evening for dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, an
erstwhile classmate of Nick’s at Yale. Daisy and Tom introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful,
cynical young woman with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship. Nick also learns a bit about
Daisy and Tom’s marriage: Jordan tells him that Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the valley
of ashes, a gray industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this
revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom and Myrtle. At a vulgar, gaudy party in the
apartment that Tom keeps for the affair, Myrtle begins to taunt Tom about Daisy, and Tom responds
by breaking her nose.

As the summer progresses, Nick eventually garners an invitation to one of Gatsby’s legendary parties.
He encounters Jordan Baker at the party, and they meet Gatsby himself, a surprisingly young man
who affects an English accent, has a remarkable smile, and calls everyone “old sport.” Gatsby asks to
speak to Jordan alone, and, through Jordan, Nick later learns more about his mysterious neighbor.
Gatsby tells Jordan that he knew Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and is deeply in love with her. He spends
many nights staring at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion.
Gatsby’s extravagant lifestyle and wild parties are simply an attempt to impress Daisy. Gatsby now
wants Nick to arrange a reunion between himself and Daisy, but he is afraid that Daisy will refuse to
see him if she knows that he still loves her. Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house, without telling
her that Gatsby will also be there. After an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby and Daisy reestablish
their connection. Their love rekindled, they begin an affair.

After a short time, Tom grows increasingly suspicious of his wife’s relationship with Gatsby. At a
luncheon at the Buchanan’s’ house, Gatsby stares at Daisy with such undisguised passion that Tom
realizes Gatsby is in love with her. Though Tom is himself involved in an extramarital affair, he is deeply
outraged by the thought that his wife could be unfaithful to him. He forces the group to drive into
New York City, where he confronts Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Tom asserts that he and Daisy
have a history that Gatsby could never understand, and he announces to his wife that Gatsby is a
criminal—his fortune comes from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities. Daisy realizes that
her allegiance is to Tom, and Tom contemptuously sends her back to East Egg with Gatsby,
attempting to prove that Gatsby cannot hurt him.

When Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive through the valley of ashes, however, they discover that Gatsby’s
car has struck and killed Myrtle, Tom’s lover. They rush back to Long Island, where Nick learns from
Gatsby that Daisy was driving the car when it struck Myrtle, but that Gatsby intends to take the blame.
The next day, Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver of the car. George, who
 has leapt to the conclusion that the driver of the car that killed Myrtle must have been her lover, finds
Gatsby in the pool at his mansion and shoots him dead. He then fatally shoots himself.

Nick stages a small funeral for Gatsby, ends his relationship with Jordan, and moves back to the
Midwest to escape the disgust he feels for the people surrounding Gatsby’s life and for the emptiness
and moral decay of life among the wealthy on the East Coast. Nick reflects that just as Gatsby’s dream
of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and
individualism has disintegrated into the mere pursuit of wealth. Though Gatsby’s power to transform
his dreams into reality is what makes him “great,” Nick reflects that the era of dreaming—both Gatsby’s
dream and the American dream—is over.

Full Book Analysis

➢ The Great Gatsby is a story about the impossibility of recapturing the past and also the
difficulty of altering one’s future. The protagonist of the novel is Jay Gatsby, who is the
mysterious and wealthy neighbor of the narrator, Nick Carraway. Although we know little
about Gatsby at first, we know from Nick’s introduction—and from the book’s title—that
Gatsby’s story will be the focus of the novel. As the novel progresses and Nick becomes
increasingly drawn into Gatsby’s complicated world, we learn what Gatsby wants: Daisy,
Nick’s cousin, the girl he once loved. Anything and anyone that stands between Gatsby and
Daisy becomes an antagonist. Although Daisy’s brutish husband Tom is the most obvious
antagon0ist, a variety of more abstract concepts—such as class difference, societal
expectations, and Gatsby’s past lies—can also be considered antagonists. The most
powerful antagonist is time itself, which prevents Gatsby from recapturing what he lost.

After a brief passage which frames the narrative as Nick’s recollections of a summer from
his past, the narrative is for the most part linear, beginning with Nick’s move to New York,
which makes him Gatsby’s neighbor. Gatsby is wealthy, with a mysterious past that is the
subject of much speculation. After meeting his neighbor at a party, Nick learns that despite
Gatsby’s success, he longs only for Daisy. Gatsby’s central aim through the novel is to see
Daisy again and recaptured their shared past. On a trip to the city with Tom, Nick meets
Tom’s mistress, Myrtle. In the rising action of the novel, Nick arranges a reunion between
Gatsby and Daisy, and Jordan tells Nick about Daisy and Gatsby’s history. Gatsby and Daisy
fall back in love, and Gatsby tells Nick one version of his life story. Many of the stories Gatsby
tells about himself turn out to be lies or half-truths. The fantastic nature of his stories gives
Gatsby’s history a mythical quality, which reinforces the sense of him as a tragic hero.

Gatsby and Daisy are briefly happy together, and Nick gets drawn into their romance, even
though the outlook for the couple’s future seems hopeless, largely because of Gatsby’s
inability to separate his dreams from reality. Both the reader and Nick can see the disparity
between Gatsby’s idealized image of the Daisy he knew five years earlier, and the actual
character of Daisy herself. Fitzgerald presents Daisy as a shallow, materialistic character,
reinforcing the sense that Gatsby is chasing a dream, rather than a real person: “There must
have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams… it had
gone beyond her, beyond everything.” On an outing into the city, Gatsby erupts and tells
everyone in the room that he and Daisy are in love and are going to run away together to
marry. However, Tom says Daisy will never leave him, and Daisy is unable to tell Tom she
never loved him. Here, for the first time, Gatsby must confront directly the possibility that his
dream cannot be attained, and see Daisy as she currently is, rather than his idealized
 remembrance of her. Even at this point, however, he remains convinced she will ultimately
choose him over Tom.

The climax of the novel comes when the group is driving back from New York in two cars,
and Myrtle, Tom’s lover, mistakes Gatsby’s car for Tom’s and runs out into the street and is
hit and killed. The car that kills Myrtle belongs to Gatsby, but Daisy is driving. After this, the
action resolves quickly. Gatsby takes the blame in order to protect Daisy, and Myrtle’s
husband, George, kills Gatsby (and then himself) as revenge. Gatsby has already died a
symbolic death at this point, when he realizes that Daisy will not call him and is not going to
run away with him after all. His dream is at last obliterated, and he heads into the morning of
his death facing reality for the first time. Nick describes the world as Gatsby now sees it as
unbearably ugly: “he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was
upon the scarcely created grass.” In contrast to the previous obsession with the past, the
final passages of Gatsby’s life are concerned with newness, creation, and the future – one
which, lacking his dream of Daisy, he finds hideous.

In the final falling action the book, Nick must also confront reality, as he realizes his
glamorous, enigmatic neighbor was the poor son of farmers who got mixed up in criminal
activities and had no true friends besides Nick. Nick tries to arrange a funeral for Gatsby, but
none of the guests from his lavish parties come. Daisy and Tom leave town, and Nick is left
alone with Gatsby’s father, who reveals the truth of his son’s humble beginnings as “James
Gatz.” After the funeral Nick decides to return to the Midwest, where he is from, feeling
disgusted by the “distortions” of the East. First, though, he visits Gatsby’s house one last time,
boarded up and already defaced with graffiti, and reflects on the power of the green light at
the end of Daisy’s dock that kindled Gatsby hope of recapturing the past up until the
moment of his death. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past,” he says, including himself in the tragedy of Gatsby’s fall.

Literary Device (Theme)

The Decline of the American Dream in the 1920s
➢ The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The main
theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all
of its action takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a
circumscribed geographical area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is
a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of
the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.

Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its
overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led
to decadent parties and wild jazz music—epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent
parties that Gatsby throws every Saturday night—resulted ultimately in the corruption of the
American dream, as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble
goals.

When World War I ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the
war became intensely disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had just faced made the
Victorian social morality of early-twentieth-century America seem like stuffy, empty
hypocrisy. The dizzying rise of the stock market in the aftermath of the war led to a sudden,
sustained increase in the national wealth and a newfound materialism, as people began to
 spend and consume at unprecedented levels. A person from any social background could,
potentially, make a fortune, but the American aristocracy—families with old wealth—
scorned the newly rich industrialists and speculators. Additionally, the passage of the
Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the sale of alcohol, created a thriving
underworld designed to satisfy the massive demand for bootleg liquor among rich and poor
alike.

Fitzgerald positions the characters of The Great Gatsby as emblems of these social trends.
Nick and Gatsby, both of whom fought in World War I, exhibit the newfound
cosmopolitanism and cynicism that resulted from the war. The various social climbers and
ambitious speculators who attend Gatsby’s parties evidence the greedy scramble for
wealth. The clash between “old money” and “new money” manifests itself in the novel’s
symbolic geography: East Egg represents the established aristocracy, West Egg the self-
made rich. Meyer Wolfsheim and Gatsby’s fortune symbolize the rise of organized crime and
bootlegging.

As Fitzgerald saw it (and as Nick explains in Chapter 9), the American dream was originally
about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. In the 1920s depicted in the
novel, however, easy money and relaxed social values have corrupted this dream,
especially on the East Coast. The main plotline of the novel reflects this assessment, as
Gatsby’s dream of loving Daisy is ruined by the difference in their respective social statuses,
his resorting to crime to make enough money to impress her, and the rampant materialism
that characterizes her lifestyle.

Additionally, places and objects in The Great Gatsby have meaning only because characters
instill them with meaning: the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg best exemplify this idea. In Nick’s
mind, the ability to create meaningful symbols constitutes a central component of the
American dream, as early Americans invested their new nation with their own ideals and
values. Nick compares the green bulk of America rising from the ocean to the green light at
the end of Daisy’s dock.

Just as Americans have given America meaning through their dreams for their own lives,
Gatsby instills Daisy with a kind of idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor
possesses. Gatsby’s dream is ruined by the unworthiness of its object, just as the American
dream in the 1920s is ruined by the unworthiness of its object—money and pleasure. Like
1920s Americans in general, fruitlessly seeking a bygone era in which their dreams had
value, Gatsby longs to re-create a vanished past—his time in Louisville with Daisy—but is
incapable of doing so. When his dream crumbles, all that is left for Gatsby to do is die; all
Nick can do is move back to Minnesota, where American values have not decayed.

The Hollowness of the Upper Class

One of the major topics explored in The Great Gatsby is the sociology of wealth, specifically,
how the newly minted millionaires of the 1920s differ from and relate to the old aristocracy
of the country’s richest families. In the novel, West Egg and its denizens represent the newly
rich, while East Egg and its denizens, especially Daisy and Tom, represent the old
aristocracy. Fitzgerald portrays the newly rich as being vulgar, gaudy, ostentatious, and
lacking in social graces and taste. Gatsby, for example, lives in a monstrously ornate
mansion, wears a pink suit, drives a Rolls-Royce, and does not pick up on subtle social
signals, such as the insincerity of the Sloanes’ invitation to lunch. In contrast, the old
aristocracy possesses grace, taste, subtlety, and elegance, epitomized by the Buchanans’
tasteful home and the flowing white dresses of Daisy and Jordan Baker.
 What the old aristocracy possesses in taste, however, it seems to lack in heart, as the East
Eggers prove themselves careless, inconsiderate bullies who are so used to money’s ability
to ease their minds that they never worry about hurting others. The Buchanans exemplify
this stereotype when, at the end of the novel, they simply move to a new house far away
rather than condescend to attend Gatsby’s funeral. Gatsby, on the other hand, whose recent
wealth derives from criminal activity, has a sincere and loyal heart, remaining outside Daisy’s
window until four in the morning in Chapter 7 simply to make sure that Tom does not hurt
her. Ironically, Gatsby’s good qualities (loyalty and love) lead to his death, as he takes the
blame for killing Myrtle rather than letting Daisy be punished, and the Buchanan’s’ bad
qualities (fickleness and selfishness) allow them to remove themselves from the tragedy not
only physically but psychologically.

Class
➢ In the monied world of The Great Gatsby, class influences all aspects of life, and especially
love. Myrtle mentions this with regard to her husband, George, whom she mistook for
someone of better “breeding” and hence greater prospects: “I thought he knew something
about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.” Similarly, Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy is bound
up with class. Only after amassing a large fortune does he feel able to make his move. At
the end of the book, class dynamics dictate which marriage survives (Tom and Daisy), which
one is destroyed (George and Myrtle), and which one will never come to be (Gatsby and
Daisy). Only the most affluent couple pulls through the events that conclude the book. In
fact, it seems that the accident may have brought them closer. When Nick spies on them
through the window, he reports that “there was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about
the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.” Because of
their elite class status, Tom and Daisy share a belief that they are immune to the
consequences of their actions. In the final chapter, Nick calls Tom and Daisy “careless
people” who “smashed up things and . . . let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

The American Dream

➢ The American Dream refers to a shared set of ideals that guide the spirit of the United States.
These shared ideals include a notion of freedom that ensures all Americans the possibility
of upward social mobility, as long as they work for it. Every character in The Great
Gatsby draws inspiration from the American Dream’s promise of wealth and prosperity. At the
same time, the novel itself critiques the notion of the American Dream. Readers may end the
novel wondering if the American Dream is actually attainable at all. Gatsby suffers the most
from the promise of social mobility inherent to the American Dream. He spends his life
believing that if he makes enough money and acquires enough possessions, he can
transcend his lower-class birth and become equal to Daisy and Tom. However, even though
Gatsby succeeds in acquiring wealth, he is never accepted by the upper class. Gatsby’s
failure to attain the American Dream suggests the Dream is both an unattainable and unwise
goal.

Love and Marriage

➢ The ideals of love and marriage are profoundly strained in The Great Gatsby, a book that
centers on two loveless marriages: the union between Tom and Daisy Buchanan and
between George and Myrtle Wilson. In both cases, the marriages seem to be unions of
convenience or advantage than actual love. Myrtle explains that she married George
because she thought he was “a gentleman,” suggesting she hoped he’d raise her class
status. Daisy nearly backed out of her marriage to Tom the day before her wedding, and
 Tom had an affair within a year of the wedding, but the couple is well-suited because of
their shared class and desire for fun and material possessions. Even Gatsby’s all-consuming
passion for Daisy seems more of a desire to possess something unattainable than actual
love. Nick, meanwhile, dates Jordan Baker throughout the book, and though their
relationship has its moments of warmth and kindness, both parties generally seem
lukewarm and emotionally distant. “I wasn’t actually in love,” Nick recalls, “but I felt a sort of
tender curiosity.” Such “tender curiosity” may be the closest thing to love in the entire novel.

Main point of The Great Gatsby

➢ Past cannot be repeated and everybody has to move forward in life.