Chapter Summary

The novel is narrated in the first person by Nick Carraway and unfolds across nine chapters over a single summer on Long Island in 1922. The plot is slight; what matters is the order in which Nick learns things, and how his view of Gatsby shifts as he does.

Chapter 1: Arrival on the Egg

Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate from the Midwest, moves East to learn the bond business and rents a small house in West Egg, the "less fashionable" of two peninsulas jutting into Long Island Sound. Across the water sits East Egg and old money. He drives over for dinner with his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a former college football star, immensely rich and casually brutal. There he meets the golf champion Jordan Baker. Tom holds forth on a racist book about the decline of the white race; a phone call from his mistress interrupts dinner. Returning home, Nick sees his neighbor for the first time — Gatsby, alone on his lawn, reaching toward a single green light across the bay.

Chapter 2: The Valley of Ashes

Between West Egg and Manhattan lies the valley of ashes, a gray industrial wasteland watched over by the fading billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. Here Tom keeps his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, wife of the garage owner George Wilson. Tom takes Nick to a small, drunken apartment party in the city. Myrtle plays at being a woman of Tom's class; when she taunts him by chanting Daisy's name, he breaks her nose with a slap. The chapter establishes the affair and Tom's violence.

Chapter 3: Gatsby's Party

Nick attends one of Gatsby's legendary summer parties, thrown weekly for hundreds of guests, most uninvited. Rumors swirl — that Gatsby killed a man, that he was a German spy. Nick finally meets his host, who is younger and more watchful than expected and calls everyone "old sport." Gatsby singles out Jordan for a private conversation. Nick pauses the party narrative to describe his ordinary working life and the beginning of a romance with Jordan.

Chapter 4: Gatsby's Story and the Errand

Driving into the city, Gatsby feeds Nick a polished autobiography — Oxford, war heroism, a life of European luxury — backed by suspicious props (a medal, a photograph). At lunch Nick meets Meyer Wolfshiem, a gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series, hinting at the criminal source of Gatsby's fortune. Jordan then reveals the real history: Gatsby and Daisy were in love in Louisville in 1917 before the war separated them; she married Tom while Gatsby was overseas. Everything — the mansion, the parties — exists to draw Daisy back. Gatsby wants Nick to arrange a reunion.

Chapter 5: The Reunion

Nick invites Daisy to tea without telling her Gatsby will be there. The meeting is agonizingly awkward, then overwhelming. Gatsby shows Daisy through his enormous house and, in the famous scene, throws his imported English shirts into the air until she weeps into them. The dream Gatsby has nursed for five years collides with a real woman, and Nick senses that no actual person could match what Gatsby has built her into.

Chapter 6: The Truth About James Gatz

Nick discloses Gatsby's origins: born James Gatz to poor North Dakota farmers, he reinvented himself at seventeen after meeting the yachtsman Dan Cody, who became his mentor. Tom, now suspicious, attends a Gatsby party with Daisy and is repelled by its new-money vulgarity. Daisy is disillusioned by the crowd. Afterward, Gatsby confides his impossible wish — that Daisy tell Tom she never loved him, erasing the past. When Nick warns that you can't repeat the past, Gatsby is incredulous: "Why of course you can!"

Chapter 7: The Confrontation and the Death

On the hottest day of the summer, the group gathers at the Buchanans' and decamps to a suite at the Plaza Hotel. There Gatsby forces the issue; Tom counterattacks, exposing Gatsby's bootlegging and mocking his pretensions. Daisy, unable to say she never loved Tom, retreats to her husband. The dream collapses. Driving home in Gatsby's car, Daisy strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson, who had run into the road, and does not stop. Gatsby, to protect Daisy, resolves to take the blame.

Chapter 8: The Murder

Gatsby tells Nick the full Louisville story before they part. George Wilson, maddened by grief and wrongly convinced the driver was Myrtle's lover, traces the car to Gatsby. He shoots Gatsby dead in his swimming pool, then kills himself. Gatsby dies still waiting for a phone call from Daisy that never comes.

Chapter 9: The Funeral and the Elegy

Nick handles the aftermath. Almost none of the hundreds who ate Gatsby's food attend the funeral; Daisy and Tom leave town without a word, and Wolfshiem declines to come. Gatsby's father arrives, proud of his son's success. Sickened by the East and by the Buchanans' carelessness, Nick decides to return to the Midwest. In the closing pages he sits on Gatsby's beach and meditates on the green light, the receding dream, and the human refusal to stop reaching for a past that cannot be recovered.