Great Gatsby

The first six chapters of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby establish a world of gaudy wealth and great moral bankruptcy, all observed by narrator Nick Carraway, a young man who moves to the "new money" West Egg, Long Island, and becomes the neighbor of mysterious Jay Gatsby. We are plunged directly into the cynical, "old money" life of Nick's cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her brutish, womanizing husband, Tom, whose decadent life is balanced by the all-consuming yearning symbolized by Gatsby stretching out toward the green light across the water—a light on Daisy's dock.  Fitzgerald soon discloses the decay of the Jazz Age by presenting the "valley of ashes," and the ruthless romance of Tom with Myrtle Wilson, and the damage to people brought about by the wealthy. Gatsby's ostentatiously publicized parties in Chapter 3 are revealed to be not mere parties, but an intricate, multi-year scheme to secure access for Daisy, and gossip runs rampant about his past life.

 

Reality is finally revealed in Chapter 6, "Jay Gatsby" is a self-consciously invented character, a development from poor farm boy James Gatz to the wealthy man he has become, in singularly single-minded determination to win Daisy back and, impossible as it is, "repeat the past." The Buchanans' visit to one of Gatsby's parties sets in contrast the underlying tension—Tom's class-based suspicion of Gatsby's "new money" is an apparently insurmountable barrier to Gatsby's ardently romantic but ultimately flawed American Dream.