The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby Summary
Our narrator, Nick Carraway, begins the book by giving us some advice of his father’s about not criticizing others. Through Nick’s eyes, we meet his second cousin, Daisy Buchanan, her large and aggressive husband, Tom Buchanan, and Jordan Baker, who quickly becomes a romantic interest for our narrator (probably because she’s the only girl around who isn’t his cousin).While the Buchanans live on the fashionable East Egg (we’re talking Long Island, NY in the 1920’s, by the way), Nick lives on the less-elite but not-too-shabby West Egg, which sits across the bay from its twin town. We are soon fascinated by a certain Mr. Jay Gatsby, a wealthy and mysterious man who owns a huge mansion next door to Nick and spends a good chunk of his evenings standing on his lawnand looking at an equally mysterious green light across the bay. Tom takes Nick to the city to show off his mistress, a woman named Myrtle Wilson who is, of course, married. (Fidelity is a rare bird in this novel.) Myrtle’s husband, George, is a passive, working class man who owns an auto garage and is oblivious to his wife’s extramarital activities. Nick is none too impressed by Tom. Back on WestEgg, this Gatsby fellow has been throwing absolutely killer parties, where everyone and his mother can come and get wasted and try to figure out how Gatsby got so rich. Nick meets and warily befriends the mystery man at one of his huge Saturday night affairs. He also begins spending time with Jordan, who turns out to be loveable in all her cynical practicality. Moving along, Gatsby introduces Nickto his "business partner," Meyer Wolfsheim. Everyone (that is, Nick and readers everywhere) can tell there’s something fishy about Gatsby’s work, his supposed Oxford education, and his questionable place among society’s elite. Next, Gatsby reveals to Nick (via Jordan, in the middle school phone-tag kind of way) that he and Daisy had a love thing before he went away to the war and she married Tom(after a serious episode of cold feet that involved whisky and a bath tub). Gatsby wants Daisy back. The plan is for Nick to invite her over to tea and have her casually bump into Gatsby. Nick executes the plan; Gatsby and Daisy are reunited and start an affair. Everything continues swimmingly until Tom meets Gatsby, doesn’t like him, and begins investigating into his affairs. Nick, meanwhile, hasrevealed Gatsby’s true past to us: he grew up in a poor, uneducated family, and would in all likelihood have stayed that way had he not met the wealthy and elderly Dan Cody, who took him in as a companion and taught him what he needed to know. Yet it wasn’t Dan that left Gatsby his oodles of money – that part of his life is still suspicious. The big scene goes down in the city, when Tom has it outwith Gatsby over who gets to be with Daisy; in short, Gatsby is ousted for being a bootlegger and Daisy is unable to leave her husband for her lover. As the party drives home to Long Island, Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, is struck and killed by Gatsby’s car (in which Gatsby and Daisy are riding). Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was driving, but that he’s going to take the blame for it. Tom, meanwhile,feeds Gatsby to the wolves by telling George where to find the man that killed his wife, Myrtle. George Wilson shoots and kills Gatsby before taking his own life. Daisy and Tom take off, leaving their mess behind. Nick, who by now is fed up with ALL of these people, breaks things off with Jordan in a rather brusque way. He is the only one left to take care of Gatsby’s affairs and arrange for hisfuneral, which, save one peculiar former guest, none of Gatsby’s party-goers attend. Nick does meet Gatsby’s father, who fills in the picture we have of Gatsby’s youth. Standing on Gatsby’s lawn and looking at the green light (which, not accidentally, turned out to be the light in front of Daisy’s house across the bay), Nick concludes that our nostalgia, our desire to replicate the past, forces us...