The Great Gatsby

In the spring of 1922, a young man named Nick Carraway came East from the Middle West, carrying with him his father's measured advice about reserving judgment—a counsel born of the recognition that not everyone has had the same advantages in life. This habit of withholding condemnation had made Nick something of a confidant to troubled souls, though it had also subjected him to the unburdening of bores, and he confesses now, looking back after the summer's events had closed, that his tolerance found its limit. He returned from the East wanting the world locked in moral attention forever, wanting no more glimpses into the riotous depths of the human heart. Only one figure remained exempt from this exhausted disillusionment—a man named Gatsby, whose extraordinary gift for hope, whose romantic readiness for life's promises, set him apart from the foul dust that eventually floated in the wake of his dreams.

Nick settled in West Egg, the less fashionable of two egg-shaped peninsulas jutting into Long Island Sound, renting a small weather-beaten bungalow wedged between the mansions of millionaires. His nearest neighbor inhabited a colossal imitation of a Norman château, complete with marble swimming pool and forty acres of lawn—this was Gatsby's place, though Nick had not yet met the man. Across the bay glittered the white palaces of East Egg, and it was there, on a warm windy evening, that Nick drove to dine with his distant cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan.

Tom had been a formidable presence at Yale, a national figure in football whose subsequent life savored of anticlimax, and now his enormous wealth expressed itself in polo ponies and restless discontent. His body remained cruel and powerful, his manner touched with paternal contempt. Their Georgian mansion overlooked the bay, its lawn seeming to leap and run toward the water, and inside Nick found Daisy and her friend Jordan Baker buoyed upon a couch like figures on an anchored balloon, their white dresses rippling in the breeze until Tom shut the windows and the caught wind died.

Daisy possessed a thrilling, singing voice that promised gay and exciting things forever hovering just out of reach, though beneath her charm lay something hollow and performing. During dinner, Tom expounded crudely on racist pseudoscience while the telephone rang with increasing urgency from inside the house. Jordan Baker—a slender, athletic young woman whose face Nick recognized from sporting photographs—revealed the evening's unspoken tension: Tom kept a woman in New York, and she apparently lacked the decency not to telephone during dinner.

Later, on the darkened porch, Daisy confessed to Nick her cynicism about everything, recounting how she had hoped her daughter would grow up to be a beautiful little fool—the best thing a girl could be in such a world. Yet even as her voice broke with apparent emotion, Nick sensed the basic insincerity beneath it, as though the whole evening had been staged to extract some feeling from him. He left confused and a little disgusted, troubled that Daisy showed no intention of fleeing her unhappy situation.

Arriving home in the loud bright night, Nick noticed a figure emerge from the shadow of Gatsby's mansion—a man standing with hands in pockets, regarding the stars. Nick nearly called out to introduce himself, but something in Gatsby's manner suggested he wished to be alone. Then the mysterious neighbor stretched his arms toward the dark water, trembling, and Nick glanced across the bay to see what held his gaze: nothing but a single green light, minute and far away, burning at the end of some dock.

When Nick looked again, Gatsby had vanished into the unquiet darkness, leaving only questions that the summer would soon begin to answer.

Somewhere between West Egg and New York, the motor road and railroad conspire briefly to skirt a desolate stretch of land—a valley of ashes, where the refuse of the city accumulates in grey ridges and grotesque hillocks, where even the men who labor there seem fashioned from the same powdery substance, crumbling as they move through air thick with industrial decay. Brooding over this wasteland, the faded eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg gaze out from an enormous billboard—blue, gigantic, bespectacled, and utterly devoid of the face they ought to belong to. Some forgotten oculist erected this advertisement years ago and then vanished, leaving those painted eyes to keep their vigil over the solemn dumping ground like the eyes of a blind god surveying a kingdom of dust.

It was this blighted geography, with its requisite halt for passing barges, that occasioned my first meeting with Tom Buchanan's mistress—a woman whose existence was insisted upon wherever Tom was known, whose presence at popular restaurants his acquaintances resented even as they noted it with that peculiar fascination the wealthy reserve for open scandal. I had been curious about her in the abstract way one is curious about other people's indiscretions, but I had no particular desire to make her acquaintance until Tom, tanked up from luncheon and possessed by that violent determination characteristic of his physical approach to the world, literally forced me from the train at the ash-heaps.

The garage of George B. Wilson materialized from the grey waste—unprosperous, bare, containing only the dust-covered wreck of a Ford crouching in shadow. Wilson himself proved a spiritless, anaemic man, blond and faintly handsome, who greeted us with a damp gleam of hope in his pale eyes. But it was his wife Myrtle who commanded attention when she descended the stairs—thickish, faintly stout, yet carrying her flesh with a smouldering sensuality that contradicted her plain features. She walked through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook Tom's hand while looking him flush in the eye, and within moments had arranged to meet us at the train station, leaving Wilson to his cement-colored obscurity.

We three rode into New York together, though Mrs. Wilson observed the proprieties by sitting in a separate car. In the city she transformed herself through small purchases—a gossip magazine, cold cream, perfume—and insisted upon acquiring a puppy of dubious pedigree from an old man bearing an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. The dog, declared an Airedale by its seller though Tom pronounced it a bitch, settled into her lap as we drove toward the apartment Tom kept for these occasions.

The flat on 158th Street proved small and overcrowded with tapestried furniture too large for its rooms, every surface cluttered with scandal magazines and the accumulated props of aspiration. That afternoon dissolved into whisky and haze—I have been drunk just twice in my life, and this was the second occasion—as Mrs. Wilson telephoned her sister Catherine and summoned neighbors named McKee, and the summer sun filled the cramped rooms with cheerful light that seemed to belong to some other, more innocent gathering.

What followed in those increasingly blurred hours would reveal still more about the careless brutality of Tom Buchanan and the desperate yearnings of those who orbit the wealthy, drawn like grey moths toward a flame that will ultimately consume them.