The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1925.

The plot: Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner who sells bonds in New York, lives at West Egg, Long Island and narrates the story of his neighbor, mysterious Jay Gatsby, whose mansion and fabulous entertainment are financed by bootlegging and other criminal activities. As a poor army lieutenant, Gatsby had fallen in love with Nick's beautiful cousin Daisy, who later married Tom Buchanan, an unintelligent, brutal man of wealth. Through Nick, he manages to meet Daisy again, impresses her by his extravagant devotion, and makes her his mistress.

Daisy's husband takes as his mistress Myrtle Wilson, sensual wife of a garage man. When her husband becomes jealous and imprisons her in her room, Myrtle escapes, runs out on the highway and is accidentally hit by a car driven by Daisy. She drives on without stopping. Gatsby protects Daisy but Tom Buchanan tells Myrtle's husband that it was Gatsby who killed Myrtle and Myrtle's husband shoots Gatsby and then himself.

The characters: Gatsby is trying to live his idealized past with Daisy. Tom longs for the return to his days as a football player.

A cocktail party: "The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light."

Gatsby's attempt to re-live his idealized view of his past experience with Daisy. The illusion, not Daisy, fed on itself. "There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion which had gone beyond her, beyond everything; he had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time."

Gatsby on re-creating the past: " 'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously; 'why of course you can. I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before.' "
Daisy: "What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon and the day after that and the next thirty years?"

Nick Carraway on Gatsby's funeral--how it once was at the height of Gatsby's parties and how it was now, at his funeral: "She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby--nothing. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption--and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-bye. The minister glanced several times at his watch so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour, but it wasn't any use. Nobody came. And I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower."

Nick Carraway on his idealized Midwest as opposed to the materialistic East: "That's my Middle West--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I were all westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to eastern life."

Nick Carraway on Tom and Daisy and the rich: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Nick Carraway on the aftermath of Gatsby's funeral: "Probably it [a car over at Gatsby's] was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn't know that the party was over. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

RayS.'s summary of The Great Gatsby: It's all about the irony of the American dream. Daisy and all that she stands for is the American dream. Rich, materialistic, throw-away relationships. The American dream.