The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession for the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan.
Considered to be Fitzgeralds magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Map of Manhattan to Long Island
THE GREAT GATSBY
Explanatory Notes
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Once Again
To
ZELDA
CHAPTER I
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that Ive been turning over in my mind ever since.
Whenever you feel like criticising any one, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world havent had the advantages that youve had.
He didnt say any more, but weve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, Im inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the con?dences were unsoughtfrequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of in?nite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I dont care what its founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reactionGatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that ?abby impressionability which is digni?ed under the name of the creative temperamentit was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever ?nd again. NoGatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust ?oated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that were descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfathers brother, who came here in ?fty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.
I never saw this great-uncle, but Im supposed to look like himwith special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in fathers of?ce. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universeso I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and ?nally said, Why ye-es, with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to ?nance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to ?nd rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the of?ce suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the ?rm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dogat least I had him for a few days until he ran awayand an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
How do you get to West Egg* village? he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a path?nder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much ?ne health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mcenas* knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in collegeone year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale Newsand now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man. This isnt just an epigramlife is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New Yorkand where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovalslike the egg in the Columbus story,* they are both crushed ?at at the contact endbut their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that ?y overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, thewell, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most super?cial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only ?fty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or ?fteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standardit was a factual imitation of some Htel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsbys mansion. Or, rather, as I didnt know Mr Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbors lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionairesall for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and Id known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven*a national ?gure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthyeven in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproachbut now hed left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away： for instance, hed brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.* It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I dont know. 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. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didnt believe itI had no sight into Daisys heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay.
The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens?nally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.
The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with re?ected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that bodyhe seemed to ?ll those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leveragea cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he likedand there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
Now, dont think my opinion on these matters is ?nal, he seemed to say, just because Im stronger and more of a man than you are. We were in the same senior society,* and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, de?ant wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
Ive got a nice place here, he said, his eyes ?ashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad ?at hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped the tide offshore.
It belonged to Demaine, the oil man. He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. Well go inside.
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house.
A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale ?ags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and ?uttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short ?ight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the ?oor.
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