The Great Gatsby

The Narrator and His Arrival in West Egg

The novel is set in the summer of 1922, in the metropolitan area of New York, during the Jazz Age and Prohibition. Nick Carraway, a thirty-year-old young man from the Midwest, relocates to New York with the intention of learning the bond business. He rents a modest house in West Egg, one of the two peninsulas jutting into Long Island Sound. West Egg is the neighborhood of the newly rich, considered less fashionable than East Egg, where old money aristocracy resides.

Nick comes from a family of some social standing and prides himself on his sense of honesty and reserve. These values make him a privileged observer of the events unfolding around him, though his role as a participating witness will increasingly entangle him in a story that does not truly belong to him. His house in West Egg sits directly next to the most ostentatious mansion in the neighborhood: the residence of Jay Gatsby.

Across the bay, in East Egg, lives his cousin Daisy Buchanan with her husband, Tom Buchanan, a former college acquaintance of Nick's. Tom is a heavyset, arrogant, and physically imposing man, heir to an enormous family fortune. Daisy, for her part, is a woman with a soft and charming voice, described as capricious and superficial, yet wrapped in an aura of magnetism. From his very first visit to the Buchanan mansion, Nick senses a tension that is quickly confirmed: Tom is carrying on an extramarital affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a mechanic who runs a gas station in what is known as the "Valley of Ashes," a desolate industrial area located between West Egg and Manhattan. Tom does not even attempt to hide the affair; he flaunts it as yet another expression of his power and privilege.

Jay Gatsby and the Establishment of the Central Conflict

The figure around whom the entire plot revolves is Nick's mysterious neighbor. Jay Gatsby is an extraordinarily wealthy man whose fortune has an unknown origin, and all manner of rumors circulate about him: that he was a German spy, that he killed a man, that he is the Kaiser's nephew. Every weekend he hosts sumptuous, legendary parties at his mansion, attended by hundreds of guests who for the most part neither know him nor have been formally invited. Despite all this social frenzy, Gatsby remains distant, watching his guests from the periphery of his own celebrations.

Nick is formally introduced to Gatsby one night when he attends one of his parties. The encounter reveals a man of studied manners, carefully constructed, who speaks with affectation and calls his interlocutor "old sport." It soon becomes clear that the entire architecture of Gatsby's life—the mansion, the parties, the displayed wealth—has a single purpose: to attract the attention of Daisy Buchanan, whose house, across the bay, is marked by a green light at the end of her dock. Gatsby has been in love with Daisy for five years, before she married Tom. The two had a relationship in 1917, when Gatsby was a young army officer without a fortune. Daisy waited for a time, but ultimately married Tom. Gatsby has quite literally built his entire subsequent existence around the goal of winning her back.

Gatsby's motivation is not simply romantic love: it is an absolute belief in the possibility of repeating the past, of erasing the five years that have elapsed and resuming the story at the exact point where it was interrupted. This conviction makes him a simultaneously grand and tragic figure, driven by an illusion that Nick himself recognizes as impossible from the outset.

The central conflict is thus established from the novel's opening chapters: Gatsby wishes to reclaim Daisy, who is married to Tom; Tom, though unfaithful, is possessive and has no intention of relinquishing his wife; and Daisy finds herself trapped between two worlds, unable to renounce the security Tom represents or to resist the absolute romanticism Gatsby offers her. Nick, enlisted by Gatsby to act as an intermediary and arrange a reunion with Daisy—which he facilitates—becomes involved at the center of a situation whose consequences will prove irreversible. Added to this nucleus of tensions is the presence of Jordan Baker, a professional golfer and friend of Daisy's with whom Nick begins a relationship, and who serves as a link between the story's various social circles.