Novel: The Great Gatsby

Overview
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby follows the rise and unraveling of an elusive self-made millionaire, Jay Gatsby, as seen through the eyes of his neighbor, Nick Carraway. Set against the glittering excess of the Jazz Age, the novel tracks a summer of parties, affairs, and confrontations that expose the moral hollowness beneath wealth and glamour. At its heart is Gatsby’s obsessive pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a love he equates with a dream of reinvention and boundless possibility, and the cost of mistaking glitter for gold.

Setting and Narration
The story unfolds in the summer of 1922 on Long Island’s North Shore, divided between nouveau-riche West Egg, where Gatsby and Nick live, and old-money East Egg, home to Daisy and her domineering husband, Tom Buchanan. The valley of ashes, a desolate industrial wasteland overseen by a billboard of unblinking eyes, sits between them and Manhattan. Nick, a Midwestern transplant learning the bond business, narrates with a blend of fascination and skepticism, his vantage shaping what is revealed and what remains myth.

Plot Summary
Nick reconnects with his cousin Daisy and meets Jordan Baker, a professional golfer. Rumors swirl about Nick’s mysterious neighbor, Gatsby, who hosts spectacular parties attended by strangers hungry for spectacle. Gatsby befriends Nick and asks him to arrange a reunion with Daisy, whom Gatsby loved before the war. In a rain-soaked tea at Nick’s cottage, the pair rekindle their bond, and Gatsby begins to believe he can restore the past exactly as it was, unveiling a mansion, shirts, and a carefully curated image as proof of his triumph.

As the affair intensifies, Tom grows suspicious. In a sweltering confrontation at the Plaza Hotel, Tom exposes Gatsby’s criminal connections and mocks his pretensions to class. On the drive back, Daisy, at the wheel of Gatsby’s car, strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s mistress, then flees. Gatsby resolves to take the blame, still protecting Daisy. Tom directs the devastated George Wilson toward Gatsby; Wilson shoots Gatsby in his pool, then kills himself. Daisy and Tom slip away, leaving no forwarding address. Nick, unable to rally the party crowd, oversees Gatsby’s sparsely attended funeral, where only a few, including Gatsby’s estranged father, appear.

Themes and Symbols
The novel interrogates the American Dream, suggesting that the promise of self-creation and prosperity has been corrupted into material excess and social cruelty. Class, old money, new money, and no money, quietly dictates who belongs and who pays. Time and memory haunt the characters; Gatsby’s faith in repetition collides with the irreversibility of experience. Symbols thread the narrative: the green light across the bay as an emblem of desire and distance; the valley of ashes as the moral residue of prosperity; the watching eyes as an impersonal, perhaps spiritual, scrutiny the characters ignore.

Style and Tone
Fitzgerald blends lyrical description with sharp social observation, balancing shimmering surfaces against biting irony. Nick’s reflective voice, both participant and witness, leaves space between events and interpretation, allowing Gatsby’s grandeur and foolishness to coexist. The cadence and imagery confer a romantic glow even as the narrative dismantles illusions.

Ending and Legacy
Disillusioned by the Buchanans’ carelessness and the shallowness of Gatsby’s former guests, Nick breaks with Jordan and returns to the Midwest, meditating on the nation’s beginnings and the perennial pull of dreams. Gatsby’s fate becomes a parable of aspiration colliding with entrenched privilege and human frailty, a portrait of a moment that reflects a broader American story of longing, reinvention, and the undertow of the past.