A Basic Great Gatsby Summary, and How Nick Ruins It for You

By: Paul Thomson
Submitted: 2009-09-29 16:10:39
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Although The Great Gatsby is one of America’s most beloved and respected novels, the basic premise of the book is so simple that it could easily make for a bad sitcom: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl marries someone else, boy buys nearby mansion, tells girl he happened to be “in the neighborhood.” What gives the story its depth and complexity – aside from the tricky love pentagram and depressing double-murder/suicide – are the elements added by Nick Carraway’s narration.

Nick tells the story of his relationship with Gatsby from memory. First, we learn that Nick is cousins with Daisy Buchanan, and that he attended Yale with her jock of a husband, Tom. The two live in the super fashionable East Egg of Manhattan, while Nick lives in the still-fashionable but less wealthy West Egg. We then accompany Tom and Nick on a trip to visit Myrtle, Tom’s mistress (who also happens to be married). Nick keeps surprisingly mum on the fact that his cousin is being royally duped, but since he makes a big deal about reserving judgment, we are left to assume he doesn’t want to interfere in other people’s business. (Or that Tom is a lot scarier than we’ve given him credit for.)

Next, we hear about Nick’s new and intriguing neighbor, Jay Gatsby. He just moved into the mansion next door and has been throwing wild parties for the entire neighborhood. Apparently, the gossip is rampant; nobody really knows who he is, where he came from, or how he got so rich. However, Nick is more interested by the fact that Gatsby likes to stand on his lawn and stare out at a pretty green light across the bay for hours. We can’t help but wonder what this guy is using to spike his punch, and can we have the recipe?

Nick starts attending Gatsby’s parties and tries to get to know the man. Even though Gatsby isn’t quite pulling off the “high society” act, he oozes charisma and likeability, so we want to believe the lie. At long last, we get to the heart of the matter: Gatsby is madly in love with Daisy, Nick’s cousin, and has been trying to win her back with his mansion-buying, "roaring" 1920s party-throwing ways. Nick agrees to “accidentally” set up a playdate so that Gatsby and Daisy have a chance to re-kindle their lost highschool love. Which they do. Hooray!

Enter Tom. Tom isn’t too keen on this Gatsby cat, and since he’s a big, manipulative bully, he makes a point of investigating the various rumors about Gatsby’s true identity. At this point, Nick chooses to reveal to us the truth of Gatsby’s humble origins – which, in the storyworld, he won’t learn about for another two chapters: Gatsby grew up poor and not particularly well educated, and only through a chance encounter with a wealthy old man did he learn what it takes to become successful in life. We still don’t know what this is, but we have a feeling it isn’t good.

Finally, the inevitable confrontation between Tom and Gatsby takes place. Tom reveals that Gatsby made his fortune through bootlegging, thus shaming Daisy into breaking off the affair. To show everyone just how un-threatened Gatsby makes him feel, Tom then gives Gatsby permission to drive Daisy home. On the way, Daisy Buchanan and Gatsby accidentally run over Tom’s mistress, Myrtle. Though we aren’t certain about who was driving at the time, Tom is sure to tell Myrtle’s husband, George, that it was Gatsby. To avenge his wife’s death, George shoots Gatsby and then himself, thus tidying everything up quite nicely for Tom. Gatsby’s funeral is held a few days later, and nobody shows up. Nick concludes his tale by saying that Gatsby’s desire to live in the past was his downfall. Oh yeah, and that everyone is a jerk and he’s moving back west.

What gives the straightforward Great Gatsby summary such a memorable overall effect is the fact that the story takes place on two levels simultaneously: the past-tense storyworld and the real-time narration. The irony here, of course, is that Nick criticizes Gatsby for living in the past using, what else!, two-hundred pages of retrospective narration. In fact, he even disrupts the novel’s timeframe by revealing information to the reader in chapter six that he himself doesn’t find out about until chapter eight! Now who’s living in the past?

In a way, Nick is both the character Nick, who silently and tolerantly bears witness to all kinds of social and moral no-no’s, and the narrating Nick, who rails on about how much he hates this guy and how much that guy annoys him and ugh! – can you BELIEVE what she’s wearing?? Storyworld Nick leads us to believe that he is an objective, trustworthy kind of guy, but by the end of the story, we realize that he has become totally disillusioned – and that real-time, narrating Nick has been disillusioned all along. “Oh no!” you say. “Now when I look back on everything that happened, *I* feel disillusioned!”

Exactly.

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