The Great Gatsby Summary: What Happens, What It Means, and Why It Endures
What it is about
The Great Gatsby is a short tragedy published by Scribner's in April 1925. F. Scott Fitzgerald sets it in the Jazz Age on Long Island, just outside New York City, in the spring and summer of 1922.
The narrator is Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and World War I veteran from the Midwest who comes east to work as a bond salesman. He rents a small bungalow in West Egg, next door to an enormous estate owned by Jay Gatsby, a millionaire nobody can quite explain. Gatsby throws vast parties every weekend. He does not join them.
Across the bay in East Egg, the older and grander side of the water, lives Nick's distant cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a former Yale football star. Through them Nick meets Jordan Baker, a golf champion and friend of Daisy's since childhood. Jordan tells him that Tom keeps a mistress who lives out in the "valley of ashes", a refuse dump between Long Island and the city.
What Nick slowly learns is that Gatsby bought the house for a reason. He and Daisy met around 1917, when he was an officer with the American Expeditionary Forces. They fell in love. He was sent overseas, and Daisy reluctantly married Tom instead. Everything Gatsby has built since, the mansion, the money, the parties, exists to bring her back. He stands on his lawn at night and looks at a green light at the end of her dock.
The main characters
Jay Gatsby is the self-made man at the centre of the book. He tells Nick about war heroism and years at Oxford. How much of it is true is one of the novel's running questions, and Tom eventually supplies an answer of his own.
Nick Carraway narrates in the first person and is never quite a neutral observer. He is drawn to Gatsby and repelled by the people around him, and the book is partly the record of him working out which side of that feeling to trust.
Daisy Buchanan is charming, wealthy and hard to pin down. Gatsby has spent years turning her into an idea, which is not the same thing as knowing her.
Tom Buchanan is old money, physically imposing and casually cruel. His affair with Myrtle Wilson, wife of the garage mechanic George Wilson, is conducted with no attempt at discretion. At a party in a rented city apartment, Myrtle mentions Daisy's name and Tom breaks her nose.
Jordan Baker gives Nick most of the backstory he needs and becomes his companion through the summer.
The themes
Class is the engine of the plot. West Egg is new money, East Egg is inherited money, and the distance between the two cannot be crossed by buying a bigger house. Gatsby has the wealth and still cannot have the life.
Ambition and the American Dream run alongside it, treated with real scepticism. Gatsby is the dream working exactly as advertised, a poor young man who becomes rich through sheer will, and the novel asks what the reward actually turns out to be.
There is also the gap between a person and the version of them someone has been carrying around for five years. Gatsby wants to repeat the past. Fitzgerald is clear about how that goes.
Scholars have also read the book closely for its treatment of gender, race and environmentalism, the valley of ashes being the most obvious example of the last.
How it ends (spoilers)
In September, Tom works out the affair. At a suite in the Plaza Hotel, Gatsby demands that Daisy say she never loved Tom. She says she loved them both. Tom then reveals that Gatsby's fortune comes from bootlegging, and Daisy stays with her husband. Tom, confident he has won, sends her home in Gatsby's car.
On the drive the car strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson outside her husband's garage. Daisy was driving, but Gatsby intends to take the blame. Nick urges him to leave. He refuses. Tom tells George Wilson who owns the car, and George, believing the owner was Myrtle's lover, shoots Gatsby in his swimming pool and then himself. The funeral is almost empty. Gatsby's father, Henry Gatz, comes. Nick, sickened by New York, goes back to the Midwest.
Why it still matters
The book was not an immediate success. Reviews were broadly favourable, but it sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October 1925, far short of what Fitzgerald had hoped. When he died in 1940 he thought he had failed and his work was forgotten.
During the Second World War the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free copies to American soldiers overseas. The novel's popularity surged, scholars reconsidered it, and it became a fixture of American high school syllabuses and of popular culture. Francis Cugat's cover painting, Celestial Eyes, impressed Fitzgerald so much that he wrote its imagery into the text, which is why that jacket remains one of the most recognisable in publishing. The Great Gatsby is now widely treated as a masterpiece and a serious contender for the Great American Novel.
