The Great Gatsby: Summary

The Great Gatsby · Summary

The novel is short and tightly built, nine chapters that move in a fixed line from Nick’s arrival in West Egg to Gatsby’s death in his own swimming pool. Below is the plot in order, chapter by chapter, so you can find the evidence you need quickly.

Chapter 1: Nick Arrives in West Egg

Nick Carraway, a young bond salesman from the Midwest, rents a small house in West Egg, Long Island, in the summer of 1922. His neighbour, a man he has not yet met, lives in a mansion next door and throws parties Nick can hear from his lawn. Across the bay in the more fashionable East Egg live Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, an old college acquaintance who is wealthy, athletic and openly unfaithful. At dinner, Nick meets Jordan Baker, a professional golfer, and watches Daisy perform a kind of restless, practised charm that does not quite hide her unhappiness. A phone call during the meal, answered too pointedly by Tom, hints at the mistress everyone but Daisy seems willing to discuss. Back at his own house that night, Nick sees his neighbour outside for the first time, standing alone on the lawn with his arms stretched toward a single green light across the water.

Chapters 2 to 3: The Valley of Ashes and Gatsby’s Party

Tom takes Nick into the grey industrial waste between West Egg and New York City to meet his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a garage owner.

This is a valley of ashes-a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardensNick Carraway, Chapter 2

At a cramped, drunken party in the Manhattan flat Tom keeps for the affair, the afternoon turns violent when Myrtle chants Daisy’s name once too often and Tom breaks her nose with a single, almost casual blow. Chapter 3 pulls back to Gatsby’s own world: Nick attends one of the huge parties next door and describes the guests who arrive uninvited and drift through the gardens like moths. He falls into conversation with a polite, oddly formal stranger who turns out to be his host. The wild rumours already circling the party, that Gatsby is a bootlegger, that he once killed a man, sit uneasily against the ordinary young man Nick has just met.

Chapters 4 to 5: Gatsby’s Story and the Reunion with Daisy

Over lunch in the city, Gatsby offers Nick a highly polished version of his own history: son of wealthy Midwestern parents, educated at Oxford, decorated for bravery in the war. He introduces Nick to Meyer Wolfshiem, his business associate, whose fortune runs through organised crime. From Jordan Baker, Nick finally learns the real reason for the parties: Gatsby bought his house specifically so that Daisy, whom he loved and lost five years earlier, would be just across the bay. Nick agrees to invite Daisy to tea. The reunion is awkward at first, Gatsby nearly loses his nerve entirely, but once the three of them cross the lawn to his mansion, the visit turns into a tour of his possessions. Shown Gatsby’s collection of imported shirts, Daisy is overwhelmed and bursts into tears among the folded fabric.

Chapter 6: Who Gatsby Really Is

Nick steps back to tell the reader the truth behind the invented biography: Gatsby was born James Gatz to poor farmers in North Dakota, and reinvented himself as a teenager after falling in with a wealthy yachtsman, Dan Cody, who showed him a life worth wanting.

the truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.Nick Carraway, Chapter 6

At a party Tom finally meets Gatsby in person and is immediately suspicious of money with no visible source. Now that Daisy has been to his house, Gatsby wants more than an affair conducted in secret: he wants her to tell Tom that she never loved him, as if the five years since they last stood together could simply be cancelled. When Nick gently points out that the past cannot be repeated, Gatsby’s certainty does not waver for a second.

Chapter 7: The Hotel Suite and the Drive Home

On the hottest day of the summer, the group moves the confrontation to a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Tom exposes exactly where Gatsby’s money comes from, and under the pressure of choosing between the two men, Daisy’s nerve fails; she cannot say she never loved Tom. Driving back to Long Island in Gatsby’s car, with Daisy at the wheel, the car strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson, who has run into the road believing the car is Tom’s. Gatsby lets Nick know, without quite saying it outright, that he intends to let the world believe he was driving.

Chapter 8: Gatsby’s Death

Nick stays with Gatsby into the early morning as he waits, uselessly, for some signal from Daisy that never arrives. Gatsby finally tells Nick the fuller story of his courtship of Daisy as a young officer before the war. Across the ash heaps, George Wilson, grieving and unravelling, is told by Tom that the yellow car belongs to Gatsby. He walks to the mansion, finds Gatsby in his swimming pool, shoots him, and then turns the gun on himself.

Chapter 9: The Empty Funeral

Nick takes charge of the arrangements, but almost nobody comes. Daisy and Tom have already left, sending no word. Meyer Wolfshiem declines to attend in person. The only real presence at the funeral is Gatsby’s father, Henry Gatz, who arrives with a boyhood schedule of self-improvement that the young James Gatz once wrote for himself, and a single other guest Nick had once found reading alone in Gatsby’s library. Before he leaves for the Midwest for good, Nick delivers his final judgement on the people who caused all of it.

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 madeNick Carraway, Chapter 9

Alone on the beach one last time, Nick looks out at the green light on Daisy’s dock and widens Gatsby’s private dream into something closer to everyone’s, a reach toward a future that keeps receding even as the past keeps pulling everyone back into it.

The Great Gatsby Summary: Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Do not retell all nine chapters in an answer. Anchor an essay on three or four turning points, the tea at Nick’s cottage, the hotel suite at the Plaza, and the empty funeral, and use the chapter references above to locate exact evidence quickly when you revise. Pair this page with Key Moments for the same events told with quotations attached.