Characters

Jay Gatsby

Born James Gatz to poor farmers in North Dakota, Gatsby invents himself at seventeen and spends his life financing the costume. By the summer of 1922 he is a fabulously wealthy West Egg host — the fortune quietly built on bootlegging and other crime — throwing enormous parties for a single reason: to draw back Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loved and lost five years earlier. Gatsby is at once absurd and magnificent. His faith that he can rewind time and reclaim the past is delusional, but Nick comes to admire the "extraordinary gift for hope" behind it. He is the book's engine and its tragedy: a man in love not with a woman but with a version of himself that requires her.

Nick Carraway

The narrator, a Midwesterner and Yale graduate who comes East to learn the bond business and rents the house next to Gatsby's. Nick presents himself as honest and reserved — "inclined to reserve all judgments" — yet he enables Gatsby's affair, edits his own conduct, and romanticizes Gatsby even as he claims to disapprove. He is the reader's eyes and an unreliable filter at once. Reading Gatsby well means reading Nick skeptically: his final verdict on Gatsby's greatness is as much confession as report.

Daisy Buchanan

Nick's second cousin, married to Tom, and the object of Gatsby's five-year obsession. Beautiful, charming, with a voice Gatsby says is "full of money," Daisy embodies the glamour of old wealth and its hollowness. She is capable of real feeling but finally chooses comfort and safety over Gatsby's dream, retreats into her marriage after the confrontation, and lets Gatsby take the blame for a death she caused. She is less a villain than a person too weightless to bear the weight Gatsby has hung on her.

Tom Buchanan

Daisy's husband — old money, a hulking former football star, arrogant, racist, and physically menacing. Tom conducts his affair with Myrtle openly while policing his wife's fidelity, and he destroys Gatsby with a few well-aimed truths at the Plaza. He and Daisy are the novel's "careless people," who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money." Tom is the closed door that money alone cannot open — the entrenched class Gatsby can never join.

Jordan Baker

A professional golf champion and Daisy's friend, who becomes Nick's romantic interest. Cool, cynical, and "incurably dishonest," she cheated to win a tournament and drives carelessly through life. Jordan is Nick's link to the Buchanans' world and a mirror for its moral looseness; his eventual break with her marks his rejection of the East.

Myrtle and George Wilson

Myrtle Wilson is Tom's mistress, a vital, striving woman who runs a garage with her husband in the valley of ashes and grasps at the wealth Tom represents. Her death under the wheels of Gatsby's car sets the tragedy's final act in motion. George Wilson, her drab, worn-down husband, is broken by her death; convinced Gatsby was both her lover and her killer, he murders Gatsby and then himself. The Wilsons are the working-class victims the careless rich leave in their wake.

Meyer Wolfshiem

A gambler and Gatsby's business associate, famous for having fixed the 1919 World Series. He is the source and symbol of Gatsby's criminal money, and his refusal to attend the funeral underscores the loyalty that Gatsby's world conspicuously lacks.