Cummings Study Guide

Type of Work
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The Great Gatsby is a novel of tragedy. In ancient Greek literature, a tragedy involved the downfall of a noble character with a tragic flaw (called hamartia). The Great Gatsby records the downfall of two characters with at least some noble characteristics: Gatsby and American society. Their tragic flaws are naive idealism and corrupt behavior. The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald's third novel. Previously, he had published This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922). 

Year of Publication

The Great Gatsby was published in New York in April 1925 by Charles Scribner's Sons.

Setting
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Place

The story takes place in the wealthy Long Island communities of West Egg and East Egg (both fictional), about twenty miles east of Manhattan. Author Fitzgerald once lived on Long Island in the village of Great Neck, Nassau County, on the north shore of the island. 

Time

The year is 1922, a time of economic prosperity and epochal social change. The workday has shortened while take-home pay has increased. Old social and cultural conventions are dying and new ones taking their place. Many women, for example, retain their jobs in the work place after the Great War (World War I) had forced them into the labor force. And all women now have the right to vote, causing them to view themselves as the equals of men. Some women even adopt masculine fashions and ways. 

Prohibition of alcoholic beverages—which begins in 1920 by government mandate after being pushed by religious fundamentalists—has spawned a vast illegal trade in bootleg whiskey, thereby incubating organized crime. The advent of mass-produced automobiles changes the way people travel and where they live and work. At the same time, racism and jingoism are on the rise to counteract gains by non-whites and the assimilation of foreigners. 

Among the major events of 1922 were the following:

• Teapot Dome Scandal, in which the U.S. Secretary of Interior, Albert Fall, received a kickback for secretly granting Mammoth Oil Company the rights to the Teapot Dome oil reserves in Wyoming. 
• Dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
• First use of laboratory-prepared insulin for the treatment of diabetes.
• Publication of the first issue of Reader's Digest.
• Start of Construction on Yankee Stadium in The Bronx, New York City.
• Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's takeover of the Italian government in Rome.
• Archeologist Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen, an Egyptian pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

Nick Carraway tells the story in first-person point of view. In describing and analyzing the characters, he sometimes relies on second-hand information, or hearsay, that he is unable to verify. For this reason, analysts of the novel sometimes refer to him as an unreliable narrator. However, he seems to do the best he can. His account, his commentary, and his interaction with the characters make him resemble the chorus in an ancient Greek tragedy.

Plot Summary
By Michael J. Cummings...© 2003
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In the spring of 1922, after serving in World War I (then called the Great War) and graduating from Yale University in New Haven, Conn., Minnesota native Nick Carraway moves to a cottage in West Egg, Long Island, a New York City suburb about twenty miles east of Manhattan. West Egg is home to nouveaux riches families unwelcome in the inner circles of old-money aristocrats in nearby East Egg, located across a narrow bay jutting down from Long Island Sound and separating the two Eggs. But lack of pedigree does not prevent the West Egg residents from ostentatious displays of wealth.

Nick—instilled with the Midwestern values of honesty, loyalty, and sincerity—is embarking on a career in the bond business in New York. He is a new breed of American pioneer—one who travels east, not west, to build a life. In contrast to the West of the nineteenth century, however, the east of the twentieth century is hardly virgin territory; rather, it is a great plain of concrete, steel, motor cars, smoke, wealth, corruption, deception.

Unlike other West Egg residents, Nick can move in East Egg society, for his cousin, the beautiful socialite Daisy Fay Buchanan, resides in East Egg with her husband, Tom, himself a Yale graduate. The Buchanans live in a Georgian colonial mansion with a front lawn that runs a quarter mile down to the bay. Tom, who inherited his wealth, is a pushy ex-football player (one of the best ends in Yale history) who believes in class distinctions and the subjugation of non-whites. When Nick dines with the Buchanans in their elegant home, he meets an intriguing guest, Jordan Baker, a friend of Daisy. Jordan, a professional golfer, is cynical and self-centered and once cheated to win a golf match, but she is also intelligent and attractive. Nick is drawn to her. During small talk, she mentions Nick’s neighbor.

“You must know Gatsby?” 

Before Nick can answer, the dinner bell summons everyone to a candlelit table on the porch. Tom mentions a book he has been reading—The Rise of Coloured Empires—and declares that the white race must be on guard lest “these other races” overstep their boundaries. After the butler calls Tom to a phone in the house, Daisy follows him and Jordan cocks a prying ear toward their hardly audible conversation inside. Nick says, “This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—.”

“Don’t talk,” Jordan says. “I want to listen.” 

When Nick asks why she wants to eavesdrop, Jordan tells him that “Tom’s got some woman in New York.” Her name is Myrtle Wilson, who lives in a shabby New York suburb near railroad tracks. Apparently it is she who called Tom. Shortly after Tom and Daisy return to the table, the phone rings again and Tom answers it. 

Meanwhile, Daisy, who speaks in a “low, thrilling voice,” tells Nick that since she last saw him she has become “cynical about everything.” When Nick asks about her three-year-old child, Daisy talks about the day the baby was born, when “Tom was God knows where.” When she found out it was a girl, she says, this was thought that crossed her mind: “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Daisy is primarily a supervisor or guardian in her child’s upbringing, for her servants tend to the routine but important tasks of daily child care.

After Nick returns home and parks his car, he sees Gatsby standing in his yard gazing out over the water at a distant green light.

One Sunday afternoon, Tom persuades Nick—in fact, almost forces him—to accompany him on a train trip to Manhattan . When the train stops in the borough of Queens to take on passengers, Tom insists that they get off so Nick can meet Myrtle Wilson, who lives nearby. They are in “the valley of the ashes,” an industrial district whose houses huddle under layers of soot from passing trains. Near a billboard advertisement displaying the glaring eyes of  T.J. Eckleberg, an ophthalmologist, they enter a yellow brick building housing the auto-repair shop of Myrtle’s husband, George B. Wilson. The Wilsons live in an apartment above the shop. While Tom and George discuss a car Tom plans to sell him, Myrtle slinks down into the shop. She is in her thirties and has a sensuous—if somewhat stout—figure. When George goes to get chairs for his guests, Tom tells Myrtle to meet him down the road for a trip into city.

After they leave, Tom tells Nick that her husband has no idea Myrtle’s having an affair, saying George believes she is visiting her sister in New York. “He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive,” Tom says.

At Tom’s apartment in Manhattan, Tom, Nick, and Myrtle rendezvous with Myrtle’s sister, Catherine, and Mr. and Mrs. McKee from an apartment below. There is talk of the mysterious Gatsby. Catherine, who attended one of his parties, says, “They say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s where all his money comes from.” Gatsby’s parties are wildly extravagant, and his guests—who seldom meet him face to face—conjecture about how he made his fortune. 

As time wears on and whiskey loosens tongues, Myrtle and Tom argue about Daisy. Apparently, Myrtle is defying Tom by mentioning his wife’s name.

“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouts Myrtle. “I’ll say it whenever I want to.”

Tom breaks her nose and the party breaks up.

Eventually Nick receives an invitation to one of Gatsby’s grand soirées. An orchestra plays, old men dance with young girls, a tenor sings Italian songs, a contralto sings jazz, and champagne arrives in glasses “bigger than finger bowls.” While seated at a table with Jordan Baker, a man comes over and says he recognizes Nick.

“Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?”

“Why, yes,” Nick says. “I was in the Ninth Machine-gun battalion.”

The man tells him he was in the Seventh Infantry until June 1918. After they talk for a while about “gray little villages in France,” Nick discovers he is speaking with Gatsby, a handsome man who smiles “with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.” 

Jay Gatsby is young—not much more than thirty—and something of an oxymoron—an “elegant . . . rough-neck,” as narrator Nick describes him—and he speaks with a British accent, referring often to his interlocutors as “old sport.” Gatsby, who met Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and fell in love with her, yearns to be reunited with her. His conspicuous lifestyle and lavish parties are designed to show Daisy that he can move in the same lofty social plane as the Buchanans and the other East Egg residents.

When Gatsby later visits Nick at his home, he tells Nick that he is from a well-to-do San Francisco family, that he studied at Oxford University in England, that he lived for a while in the capitals of Europe, that he collected jewels and hunted big game, and that he served in the Great War, earning a medal for valor in Montenegro. After the visit, Nick has lunch in New York with Gatsby, and Gatsby introduces him to Meyer Wolfsheim, a shadowy character who may have mob connections. Gatsby gets up to make a phone call, and Nick and Wolfsheim talk at length—about Gatsby and about trivialities, including Wolfsheim’s cuff links, which he says are human molars. After Wolfsheim leaves, Gatsby tells Nick that Wolfsheim is a gambler and is the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. He didn’t get caught, Gatsby says, because “He’s a smart man.”

Later that afternoon, at a tea garden in the Plaza Hotel, Jordan Baker tells Nick about Daisy and her marriage to Buchanan. Afterward, while Nick and Jordan are riding in a carriage in Central Park, Jordan talks about Gatsby’s love for Daisy. He bought his mansion, she says, just so he could be close to her. What’s more, he wants Nick to invite Daisy to tea. Unknown to Daisy, Gatsby will be there. He wants to show her his house. As the carriage drives on, Nick puts his arm around Jordan and draws her close to him.

Gatsby reunites with Daisy at Nick’s, and he escorts her through the mansion and shows her his possessions. The meeting is uncomfortable, awkward. Nevertheless, they fall in love all over again. To Gatsby, Daisy is perfect, flawless. He fails to realize that she is timorous, hesitant, and well ensconced in her East Egg lifestyle. To Daisy, Gatsby is a welcome change from her churlish husband. They carry on an affair and, for a short time, they are happy.

Meanwhile, Nick finds out that Jay Gatsby is actually James Gatz, who was born and reared in North Dakota by no-account farm folk but changed his name when he was seventeen and worked as a clam digger and fisherman along the shore of Lake Superior. After attending St. Olaf’s College for two weeks, he returned to Lake Superior and landed a job on the yacht of Dan Cody, who had made millions in Nevada silver, Montana copper, and Yukon gold. For five years, young Gatsby served as Cody’s factotum, working as a steward, mate, secretary, and skipper while the yacht—the Tuolomee—sailed to the West Indies and the Barbary Coast. Under Cody, Gatsby learned how to make money.

When the Buchanans host Gatsby, Nick, and Jordan at a luncheon in their home, Daisy, restless, suggests that they all go into New York City. While the women go upstairs to get ready, Tom fetches a bottle of whiskey to take along. When Tom suggests that he and Gatsby switch cars, with Tom driving Gatsby’s “circus wagon” and Gatsby driving Tom’s coupe—Daisy decides to ride with Gatsby while Nick and Jordan ride with Tom. Before getting in with Gatsby, Daisy runs her hand over his coat. It is a small but revealing gesture. After Tom drives off he says, “Did you see that?” When they react as if they don’t know what he’s talking about—which they do, of course, for they were the ones who set up the affair between Gatsby and Daisy—Tom says, “You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you?” Then he says he has been investigating Gatsby and begins criticizing him as a phony. Jordan asks why he invited Gatsby to lunch.

“Daisy invited him,” Tom says. “She knew him before we were married—God knows where!”

Because Gatsby’s car is low on gas, Tom pulls in to get some at George Wilson’s garage. When Wilson pumps the gas, he tells Tom that he plans to go West with Myrtle. At that moment, Gatsby and Daisy pass by in the coupe. Nick realizes why Wilson wants to leave the New York area: He has discovered that Myrtle has been having an affair, although Wilson does not know with whom. Tom is crestfallen. In a single afternoon, he appears to have lost his wife and his mistress. 

After Tom drives off and catches up with Gatsby, Gatsby pulls over and Daisy waves Tom to the roadside. They discuss possible destinations and end up going to the Plaza Hotel, where they rent the parlor of a suite situated over a ballroom where a wedding is in progress. After Tom brings out the whiskey bottle and they send out for ice, Tom questions Gatsby about his past and then says, “What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?” Daisy tells Tom he is out of order and he should have “a little self-control.” 

Tom says, “Self-control! “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife!”

Gatsby says, “I’ve got something to tell YOU, old sport—” Daisy interrupts and suggests they all go home. But Tom asks Gatsby to speak his mind.

“Your wife doesn’t love you,” says Gatsby. “She’s never loved you. She loves me. . . . She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me.”

Tom insists that Daisy loved him when they married and that she loves him now. He admits that he sometimes goes “off on a spree” but says that he always comes back.

Daisy denies that she ever loved Tom, then later recants: “I did love him once.”

Tom says, “There’re things between Daisy and me you’ll never know.”

Gatsby asks to speak to Daisy alone, but she says, “Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom.”
“Daisy’s leaving you,” Gatsby says. 

Tom says he knows Gatsby has connections with Meyer Wolfsheim, saying Gatsby and Wolfsheim sold bootleg grain alcohol in New York and Chicago. Gatsby defends himself, but Daisy begins to withdraw from him into an emotional cocoon. After the "party" breaks up, Gatsby and Daisy drive back to East Egg, this time in Gatsby’s car. Daisy is at the wheel. In the other car, Nick, who has just turned thirty, is happy to have Jordan Baker beside him leaning against his shoulder. She is too smart to put faith in wild dreams from one year to the next, he believes.

Meantime, George Wilson has been beating Myrtle. She runs out of the garage and into the path of Gatsby’s yellow car. It strikes and kills her. Later, when Tom is driving back to East Egg with Nick and Jordan, he sees a crowd gathering at the scene of the accident. He stops. When he investigates, he discovers the body of Myrtle on a work table inside the garage. A policeman is writing notes.

After Tom arrives home, his butler calls a taxi for Nick. While Nick is waiting for it outside, Gatsby steps out of the bushes and tells Nick what happened. Although Daisy was driving the death car, he says, he will say he was. He is waiting there on the Buchanan property in case Tom tries to give Daisy trouble. She will turn the light on and off in that event. Nick checks the house and finds that Daisy and Tom are sitting quietly together, with Tom’s hand covering Daisy’s. 

The next day, George Wilson—distraught and disoriented—goes to Gatsby’s house. Gatsby is in his swimming pool lounging on a pneumatic mattress. Wilson shoots and kills Gatsby, then turns the gun on himself. Nick later discovers that it was Tom Buchanan who told Wilson that Gatsby was the driver of the car. Daisy never does anything to correct the lie or salvage Gatsby’s reputation. Nor does she attend Gatsby’s funeral. Only Gatsby’s father and several servants are there. Meyer Wolfsheim, however, sends his condolences in a message, saying "This has been one of the most terrible shocks of my life. . . .If there is anything I can do a little later let me know."

Months later, when Nick meets Tom on a street, he pries the truth from Tom—that it was indeed he who told Wilson that Gatsby was driving the car that killed Myrtle. (Actually, Tom says, he told Wilson that Gatsby owned the car, but it was the same as if he had told Wilson that Gatsby was the driver.)  Nick cannot forgive Buchanan for what he did, but he does believe that Buchanan thinks he was entirely justified in blaming Gatsby. Nick also observed, "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." 

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Gatsby dreams of one day being reunited with Daisy Buchanan. To win her back, he makes a fortune—apparently through dealings with mobsters—so that he can compete in the moneyed world of Daisy. But though his wealth buys him a place in elite society, it cannot buy him Daisy. Ultimately, he becomes a man who has everything but ends up with nothing. 

The Death of an Ideal

After Europeans colonized America, the New World offered them the dream of a better life if they worked at honest jobs and held fast to noble goals and ideals. Everyone had a chance to fulfill his dream, for everyone was equal. In The Great Gatsby, the central characters achieve wealth and social status. But their craving for material possessions and high living overcomes the desire to aspire to noble ideals. Racism and snobbery obviate equality. Selfishness undermines selflessness. 

.Corruption in Capitalist America

The First World War made America a powerful nation, not only militarily but also economically. Factories mass-produced cars, radios, telephones, kitchen appliances, and other goods. Jobs opened at home, and markets for American-made products opened abroad. Hollywood and the entertainment industry flourished. Even gangsters thrived, thanks in part to the Volstead Act, a new law passed to enforce the 18th Amendment prohibition of the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages. Mobs circumvented the law, making and selling booze on a large scale at speakeasies (nightclubs that served the liquor) and bribing many police officers to look the other way. 

In the meantime, America's well-to-do bought what they wanted: new homes, fast cars, the latest fashions. And they threw parties, like those at Gatsby's, where they consumed illegal gin and whiskey, danced to the hottest jazz, gossiped, met paramours, and made shady business deals. It is this self-indulgent, materialistic, corrupt society that Fitzgerald holds up to public view in The Great Gatsby. 

What Money Cannot Buy: Happiness

Gatsby and the Buchanans have everything that they want materially but little, if anything, spiritually. Gatsby tries to buy the one thing that will make him happy, the love of Daisy, but fails. Meyer Wolfsheim (representing the real-life Arnold Rothstein) attempts to buy the 1919 World Series, bribing Chicago White Sox players to throw the series. Although the novel does not discuss at length the series and its outcome, readers of Fitzgerald's novel well knew all the details. After the series, suspicions of a fix surfaced, and four of the eight players who reportedly accepted bribes admitted their guilt to a grand jury. In a trial, the accused players were acquitted because key evidence could not be found. However, the baseball commissioner forbade all eight players—including one of the greatest players in the history of baseball, Shoeless Joe Jackson—from ever playing professional baseball again. 

Irresponsibility

Tom Buchanan, Daisy Buchanan, and Jordan Baker all act irresponsibly. Born into wealthy families that saw to their every need, they expect others—such as servants and friends—to look out for their welfare while they go their merry way. Jordan Baker drives carelessly and expects others to get out of the way. Daisy shirks her responsibility as a mother. Tom cheats on his wife with Myrtle Wilson and openly crows about his affair. Nick Carraway says of the Buchanans, "They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made."

Near the end of the novel, Daisy strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson in a hit-and-run accident while driving home from New York in Gatsby's car. Gatsby is in a passenger seat. But Daisy never admits that she was at the wheel when the accident occurred. Tom Buchanan, who knows all the details of the accident, implicates Gatsby when talking with Myrtle's husband, George Wilson. So Gatsby takes the blame—and dies at the hands of Wilson.

Bigotry

Many Americans of the 1920's were openly bigoted against blacks, Jews, Roman Catholics, and other racial, ethnic, and religious groups. When Nick Carraway is a dinner guest at the Buchanan home, Tom Buchanan exhibits bigotry when he discusses a book he is reading, The Rise of the Coloured Empires. Of the author, he says, "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things." At a small party in Tom's New York City apartment, Mrs. Lucille McKee, one of the guests, observes, "I almost married a little kyke who'd been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's way below you!' But if I hadn't met Chester, he'd of got me sure." Kyke (or kike) is a deeply insulting slang term for a Jew. 

Climax

The climax of the novel occurs during an argument between Gatsby and Buchanan over Daisy, who admits that she once loved Tom. Gatsby says he wants to speak to Daisy alone, but Daisy immediately says “Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom."

Writing and Plotting
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Fitzgerald’s prose is brilliant—poetic at times, making use of metaphor and simile to paint images of people and places. The opening paragraph of Chapter 2 compares the "valley of ashes" to a wheat field:

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

Gatsby's Lavish Parties

Gatsby's lavish parties the lengths to which he will go to impress others--in particular Daisy Buchanan. They also serve to underscore the dissipation of the young people who come to feed at the Gatsby trough. In the beginning of Chapter 3, narrtor Carraway describes what it was like at Gatsbys's when people gathered there to drink and romp through all hours of the day and night.

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited--they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.

Symbols
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Among the symbols Fitzgerald uses in the novel are these: 

East Egg, Long Island: This community, where the Buchanans reside, represents the long-established aristocrats, or "old money." Its residents generally are corrupt and jaded.
West Egg, Long Island: This community, where Gatsby and Nick Carraway reside, represents the nouveaux riches, or "new money." Its residents tend to be regarded as upstart outsiders by the East Egg crowd. 
The Green Light: It represents Gatsby’s dreams and gives him the go-ahead to pursue them. 
The Valley of the Ashes: This lower-class section of Queens is so named because of the soot deposited there by passing steam locomotives. The valley represents the corruption that the upper-class characters inflict on society. 
The Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg, Ophthalmologist: Displayed prominently on a billboard, they apparently represent the eyes of God watching the characters play out the drama. 
The Weather: It represents the shifting moods of the characters. For example, Gatsby and Tom angrily confront each other in a hotel room on the hottest day of the year. 

Study Questions and Essay Topics

• After researching  the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, write an essay explaining to what extent he presented his own political and social view through the characters, settings, and themes in The Great Gatsby. 
• Is Daisy as desirable as Gatsby believes? In other words, he blind to her faults and weaknesses?
• If Daisy had divorced Buchanan and married Gatsby, would she be happy with him? Would Gatsby be happy with her?
• Would Tom Buchanan have been a better person if he had been born into an average family that had to work hard to meet its needs?
• Who is the most admirable character in the book? Who is the least admirable?
• Write a psychological profile of Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, or Daisy Buchanan?..