Nick Carraway – (narrator), claims to be non-judgmental and this has made him “privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.”

Is from the West and moved to the East.  His family is in the hardware business.  He claims that he is descended from the “Dukes of Buccleuch” (look this up).

He is descended or claims to be descended from aristocracy.  His family is probably upper-middle class.  He works for a living. 

Was in World War I (The Great War).  Graduate from YALE (New Haven).  He works selling bonds.

Nick seems to be a reliable narrator but he does have moments.

“Midas, Morgan, and Maecenas” (page 4) – allusion (look up).

Eggs – West Egg and East Egg (these are in the Long Island Sound).  There is the egg in the Columbus Story (Columbus story).

Birth – the idea of infinite possibilities, dreams.  Before the egg is hatched anything can happen.

Setting: East and West Egg; June 7^th 1922. 

Tom: Yale – extremely rich (he inherited).  Played football – “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven – a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.” 

“They had spent a year in France for no particular reason and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.”

  “I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.”

Tom Buchanan – has a girl in New York (she’ll be important) and is a racist. 

Daisy “Fay” Buchanan – “there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.” 

From Louisville, the South.  She is from a rich aristocracy (a south family that probably owed a plantation). 

Jordan Baker – golf player.  From Louisville.  Single – symbol of the “new” woman of the 1920s.  Has a male name.  Foreshadow: Nick remembers a “critical, unpleasant story” about Jordan that he heard somewhere.

Jay Gatsby – at the end reaching out his had for the green light.

“No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interested in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” 

Myrtle Wilson (Tom’s girl). 

Chapter 2

Settings: Valley of Ashes and New York City

Valley of Ashes is both an allusion (to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – a poem that refers back to World War I, and turns London into a city of the dead, spiritually dead) and a symbol.  The Valley of Ashes is were “dreams” die and the spiritually dead live. 

In the Valley of Ashes another symbol resides: The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.  A symbol to eyes of God (though God is dead). 

In the Valley of Ashes live George and Myrtle Wilson.

George Wilson is a sick, anemic man.  He is of the working class and he has failed in life.  He owns a poor little gas station.  He hopes – or dreams – of buying Tom’s car so that he can sell it for a profit and move west.  As one point in this chapter, Myrtle “smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom…”

Myrtle Wilson is Tom’s “girl”.  Tom is using her for a fling.  Tom has rented Myrtle an apartment in Manhattan (New York) and in this apartment Myrtle dreams.  Her dream is to escape her working class life and become wealthy and live like the wealthy. 

On the way to the apartment, Tom buys Myrtle a dog.  This “dog” will be an allusion (keep this in mind for the end of the novel).  Myrtle in reality is Tom’s dog.   There’s a reference about a dog collar later in the chapter.  Who is this collar for?

At Myrtles (or Tom’s) apartment a party happens.  Myrtle invited up the Mckees and her sister Catherine.

Mr. McKee is a photographer – a poor photographer. 

Catherine is around thirty, slender, and “worldly” (not).  She’s a gossip. 

Catherine gives the first rumor about Gatsby – “he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s.” 

Catherine also presents a lie about Tom and Daisy’s marriage: “Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to” (this in reference to Tom and Myrtle).  “It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart.  She’s a Catholic and they don’t believe in divorce.”

Myrtle, of course, challenges (after an afternoon of drinks) Tom’s marriage by yelling “Daisy Daisy Daisy” over and over.  Tom, showing her that Myrtle is beneath Daisy and that his marriage isn’t to be question, breaks her nose. 

New York City is the place in this book where dreams run into reality. 

Versailles (what happens there) is mentioned a few times in this chapter as is Town Tattle and Simon Called Peter

 

Gatsby's Party

Nick Carraway is invited to his party, but he claims to be one of the few.  People at Gatsby's party's at "according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks."  A chauffeur in a "uniform of robin's egg blue" (is this important?) brings Nick the invitation.

Gilda Gray - Follies (allusion -Ziegfield Follies).  Lots of mentions of automobiles in this chapter.

Nick quickly runs into Jordan Baker at the party.  Jordan is with a younger man who is still in college (there is a reason for this - he is "a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo").  Nick and Jordan sit with a few girls who share some gossip:

1) One rip her dress at a former party and Gatsby sent her a new one worth $265 - because "He doesn't want any trouble with anybody"

2) Rumor #2 - Gatsby had "killed a man once."  Gatsby's name = BY GATs

3) "He was a German spy during the war".  Rumor #3

The three girls are all with girls named "Mr. Mumbles" (this is a joke).

Jordan and Nick go to Gatsby's library where they meet OWL EYES (think of the name).  Owl Eyes tells them that Gatsby's library is full of real books, but the pages are uncut.

Owl Eyes is in the library because he's "been drunk for about a week" and  he "thought it might sober" him up "to sit in the library."  Mrs. Claud Roosevelt brought him.  Allusion.

Nick later accidentally meets Gatsby.  Gatsby recognizes him from the war and uses the phrase "Old Sport" a lot.

Gatsby's smile "was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance".  The butler comes and tells Gatsby that Chicago is on the line.

Jordan than tells Nick - Rumor #4 - that Gatsby claims to be an Oxford man.  She doesn't believe him.

Mr. Tostoff's "Jazz History of the World" plays out in the Gardens (allusion - think Jazz Age and famous musicians).

There are a bunch of "drunken" fights as husbands tried to get there wives to leave.  Nick then witnesses a car crash with someone so drunk that they don't even know that they crashed and the wheel of the car is no longer connected.  (1st mention of car crashes)

Nick and Jordan after a while begin dating.  He says, "I felt a sort of tender curiosity."  At a house-party in Warwick, Nick reports, Jordan borrowed a car and left it in the rain with its top down and then lied about it (not a car wreck - but close and due to someone being careless.  This is also Jordan's 1st "lie" that the reader becomes aware of).  Nick quickly remembers what "eluded me that night at Daisy's.  At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers --a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round."  The caddy withdrew his statements and it was dropped, but there it was.  According to Nick, "Jordan instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men" (ah - so back to the undergrad).  "She was incurable dishonest...and wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage."

Then - Jordan drove so close to a workman that the fender flicked a button on the man's coat.  Nick tells her that she is a rotten driver and should be more careful.  Jordan responds that it takes two to make an accident (love is a car wreck metaphor).

Nick: "Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself."
Jordan: I hope I never will.  I hate careless people.  That's why I like you."

Nick claims at the end of the chapter that he is one of few honest people that he has known.  (interesting statement.  He says it after admitting he needs to break it off with some girl back West who he has been writing letters and signing them "Love Nick".