The Great Gatsby – Plot Summary

The Great Gatsby –

Plot Summary

Nick Carraway, a Yale University graduate from the Midwest who travels to New York after WWI to consider a career in bonds, is the narrator of the novel. He describes the events of the summer he spent in the East two years later, piecing together his experience through a sequence of flashbacks that aren’t necessarily recounted in chronological order.

Nick moves to the imaginary community of West Egg on Long Island in the spring of 1922, where he finds himself living amid the newly wealthy’s huge houses. Daisy and her gruff, immensely wealthy husband Tom Buchanan reside across the water in the more genteel community of East Egg.

Nick visits them for dinner early in the summer, when he meets Jordan Baker, Daisy’s buddy and a well-known golf winner, who informs him that Tom has a mistress in New York City. Daisy reveals to Nick that she has been unhappy in a private chat.

When he returns to his West Egg home, he notices his next-door neighbor, Jay Gatsby, standing alone in the dark and reaching his arms out to a green light shining across the water at the end of Tom and Daisy’s pier.

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