The Great Gatsby — Commentary

In brief

Nick Carraway, a Yale man from the Middle West, rents a bungalow on Long Island in the summer of 1922 to learn the bond business. His neighbour is Jay Gatsby, who gives enormous parties and attends them like a stranger. Across the bay lives Nick’s cousin Daisy, married to the brutal, rich Tom Buchanan. Gatsby loved her five years ago, when he was a penniless officer, and everything he owns has been acquired to get her back. By September a woman is dead on the road, Gatsby is dead in his swimming pool, and the Buchanans have left town.

That is the whole plot of a novel of about fifty thousand words. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s achievement is that the story comes through one man’s sentences, good enough to make a crook’s folly feel like the fate of a continent. The last line is the one everyone knows: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The argument

The plain argument is about class. Money does not make you one of the people who have always had it. Gatsby can buy shirts, a hydroplane and a library of real books, but at the Plaza Tom needs only to say “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” and the thing is finished. When Nick tries to describe Daisy’s voice, it is Gatsby who gets there: “Her voice is full of money.” He understands exactly what he wants, and he wants it anyway.

The larger argument is about time and America. Nick warns Gatsby off: “You can’t repeat the past.” Gatsby answers: “Why of course you can!” The final pages move that delusion from one bootlegger to a whole nation, from the green light on Daisy’s dock to the “fresh, green breast of the new world” that Dutch sailors saw. Gatsby, sprung “from his Platonic conception of himself”, is what the country told its boys to be, and the country’s rich will not have him to dinner.

My own view is that this enlargement is both the novel’s glory and a sleight of hand. A man who fixes things with Meyer Wolfshiem has been turned into the American dream by a neighbour with reasons of his own. The book knows it. That is why it needs Nick.

The nine chapters

Chapter I. Dinner at East Egg, with Tom’s race theory, Daisy’s “beautiful little fool” and, at the end, Gatsby reaching towards “a single green light”.
Chapter II. The valley of ashes, Dr Eckleburg’s eyes, and Tom’s mistress Myrtle Wilson in a New York flat, where Tom breaks her nose.
Chapter III. A party, Gatsby at last, “one of those rare smiles”, and Jordan Baker, who lies.
Chapter IV. Gatsby’s drive to town and his false life story, then Wolfshiem at lunch, then Jordan’s account of Louisville in 1917.
Chapter V. Tea at Nick’s. Gatsby knocks a clock off the mantelpiece, shows Daisy his shirts, and the green light loses its meaning.
Chapter VI. The truth about James Gatz and Dan Cody, placed early, and Daisy at a party, hating it.
Chapter VII. The longest, on the hottest day: lunch, the Plaza, the quarrel, Myrtle killed by the yellow car.
Chapter VIII. Gatsby tells Nick about Daisy and waits for a call that does not come. George Wilson comes instead.
Chapter IX. The funeral almost nobody attends, Gatsby’s father with a boyhood schedule in a copy of Hopalong Cassidy, Tom outside a jeweller’s and the close.

Nick Carraway

Everything depends on Nick, and Nick is not to be trusted. He does not lie about events. He is a moral fraud of an interesting and very human kind, and the novel lets you catch him.

In his first paragraph he says: “I’m inclined to reserve all judgements.” He then judges everyone he meets for nine chapters, usually within a sentence. He ends Chapter III with the book’s most outrageous boast: “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” This comes minutes after explaining that he is signing letters “Love, Nick” to a girl back home he means to drop, and that Jordan is “incurably dishonest”. Jordan gives him the verdict on the last pages: “I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.” He answers: “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.” Even that is a pose, and a beautiful one.

His actions are worse than his claims. He arranges the tea that sets the killing in motion. He guesses at the truth (“Was Daisy driving?”) and gets a yes, and the book never shows him telling anyone. When Tom admits to pointing Wilson at Gatsby’s door, all he offers is silence: “There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.” He calls the Buchanans “careless people”, a line of tremendous contempt, and in the next sentence: “I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to.”

Then there is what he leaves out. Chapter II ends with a gap: he goes down in the lift with the pale Mr McKee and the next thing he reports is “sitting up between the sheets” in McKee’s bedroom, with the man in his underwear. Critics have argued for decades about whether this means what it seems to, and the London Review of Books treats Nick’s sexuality as a possible key to him. Whatever else it is, it is a narrator choosing where to cut.

And yet he is the novel’s only believer. “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction”, he says in the opening, which tells you two things: that Nick is the author of what you are reading, and that he has decided in advance. He says “I disapproved of him from beginning to end” and also shouts across the lawn “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Both are true. Nick needs Gatsby to be great, because a man who has failed at love, business and honesty by thirty can then say he knew one person who believed in something. The book’s unreliability is therefore no trick for readers to solve. It is the subject: romance is what a disappointed man makes of a neighbour, and the last page’s “we” invites us to join him.

The voice

Fitzgerald wanted to leave behind the realism of his first two novels and had Conrad and Cather in mind; he later apologised to Cather for an unintended echo of A Lost Lady. He took Marlow’s method from Heart of Darkness, in which a witness tells a story that shapes him, and made it American and quick.

The prose attaches feeling to objects: “blue gardens”, the “gorgeous pink rag of a suit”. Comedy is everywhere and often overlooked. The owl-eyed drunk in the library, amazed that the books are real, is funny at the party and devastating at the graveside: “The poor son-of-a-bitch.”

The Eckleburg billboard is the book’s best joke. Wilson says “God sees everything” and Michaelis says “That’s an advertisement”. The eyes owe something to Francis Cugat’s jacket painting, whose early sketches Fitzgerald saw before he finished writing.

The people

Jay Gatsby

James Gatz of North Dakota took his name at seventeen. He has rehearsed so long that “old sport”, used more than forty times, sounds like something learned from a manual. Fitzgerald’s Long Island neighbour Max Gerlach is the usual model.

Daisy Buchanan

Daisy is not the simple villain she is often called. Her “I hope she’ll be a fool” is a clever woman’s bitter joke, and she may be the only person in the book who sees what her life is. She also lets Gatsby take the blame for her driving and does not send a flower. Ginevra King, Fitzgerald’s lost Chicago girl, is the original.

Tom Buchanan

Tom is a Yale football hero at thirty, a bully who has read “The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard”, Fitzgerald’s jab at Lothrop Stoddard. He is the only character whose lies always work.

Jordan Baker and Myrtle Wilson

Jordan is the golfer who cheated, modelled on Edith Cummings, and the one person who sees through Nick. Myrtle’s vitality is the only real energy in the book, and she is killed for it. Wolfshiem, the fixer of the 1919 World Series, is Arnold Rothstein drawn as a “flat-nosed Jew”, and that antisemitic portrait is Nick’s and also Fitzgerald’s.

Perkins and Trimalchio

Fitzgerald sent the typescript to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s in the autumn of 1924. Perkins’s contribution was criticism by letter, and it is the most famous editorial note in American publishing. On 20 November, praising the book, he wrote: “Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him. His outlines are dim.” He suggested that Gatsby’s claims come out bit by bit rather than at the end. Fitzgerald replied in December: “My first instinct after your letter was to let him go and have Tom Buchanan dominate the book. But Gatsby sticks in my heart.”

The rewriting was Fitzgerald’s own. Perkins had galleys set from the typescript, under the title Trimalchio in West Egg, and Princeton has them, covered in pencil with long typed additions that he worked on in Rome in the first two months of 1925. The greatest change, as Zachary Leader’s review in the LRB sets out, was moving parts of Chapters VII and VIII to the start of Chapter VI, so that the truth about James Gatz comes straight after the reunion instead of near the end. Chapters VI and VIII were heavily rewritten. In the galleys Daisy packs her bags to go with Gatsby and he sends her back; that was cut. James L. W. West III edited the unrevised version for Cambridge as Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby (2000).

Fitzgerald went through Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio in West Egg and The High-Bouncing Lover. Perkins and Zelda preferred The Great Gatsby and he agreed unhappily; Petronius’s upstart host survives once, in Chapter VII: “his career as Trimalchio was over”. In March 1925 he cabled for Under the Red, White and Blue, too late. He also defended one word on the last page, “orgastic”, when Perkins queried it. Edmund Wilson’s 1941 edition changed it to “orgiastic”, the reading of the free text used here; West’s 2019 Cambridge variorum documents the change.

A failure in his lifetime

Scribner’s published on 10 April 1925 at $2. The Library of Congress gives a first printing of 20,870 copies, which did not sell out until June 1926, and a second printing of 3,000, boxes of which were still in a warehouse at his death. Fitzgerald had expected 75,000 or more. The stage version and the silent film brought in money; the book did not. A 1934 Modern Library reprint did not take. In the last month of his life seven copies sold, and his royalties that year came to $13.13. His letter to Perkins in 1940 has the sentence that hurts: “But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much.”

Wilson reprinted it with The Last Tycoon in 1941. Then, in 1945, 155,000 copies went to American servicemen in pocket paperback Armed Services Editions, one of some 1,300 titles in a programme that printed over 122 million. That is the standard account and not the whole of it: critics had already started a full-scale Fitzgerald revival by 1944, and Arthur Mizener’s biography The Far Side of Paradise followed in 1951. By 1960 it was selling 100,000 a year, and it has now sold some 30 million.

Readers and critics

H. L. Mencken’s 1925 review called it “no more than a glorified anecdote” while admiring the finish. T. S. Eliot, sent a copy, wrote that “it has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years”. Fitzgerald said that not one reviewer “had the slightest idea what the book was about”.

Recent critics have read it for race, class and gender as well as for the dream, with good reason. Tom’s Nordics, Nick’s remarks about the car with “three modish negroes”, and Wolfshiem are part of the book’s fear of a changing America, and Nick shares more of it than he admits. The common classroom error is to take Nick at his word.

Afterlives

Owen Davis’s Broadway play, directed by George Cukor, opened on 2 February 1926 and ran for 112 performances. The first film followed that year, directed by Herbert Brenon, and is lost but for a trailer. Then came Alan Ladd in 1949, Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in 1974 under Jack Clayton, and Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. None has solved Nick, since a camera shows you Gatsby, and the book is about someone looking at him.

The stage has done better. Gatz by Elevator Repair Service (2010 in New York) has an office worker reading the entire text aloud. John Harbison’s opera reached the Metropolitan Opera in 1999. A musical with Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada started at Paper Mill Playhouse in 2023.

The US copyright ran out on 1 January 2021, and retellings followed, including Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful (2021), with Jordan as a Vietnamese adoptee, and Michael Farris Smith’s Nick (2021). So did a flood of carelessly altered and incomplete reprints.

How to read it

Use a known text. It is free in the United States and, since Fitzgerald died in 1940, in the EU. Project Gutenberg’s ebook 64317 is complete and clean, and comes from the Standard Ebooks edition. Its spellings are British (“honour”, “judgements”) and it reads “orgiastic”, so it is not a copy of the 1925 printing. For a scholarly text use West’s Cambridge variorum. Avoid cheap reprints you cannot identify.
Read it twice in a row. The second reading shows you what Nick is doing.
Distrust every claim of honesty. Note what Nick does in the sentence after he says he reserves judgement.
Read Chapter IV’s lie and Chapter VI’s truth together. Fitzgerald moved the truth forward on purpose.
Do not skip the jokes. The guest list at the start of Chapter IV is the funniest page in the book.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899). The witness narrator who has also been changed by his monster.
Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (1923). The book Fitzgerald feared he had echoed.
Petronius, Satyricon (first century). Trimalchio’s dinner, the original of the rich man’s party.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934). The same subject at length, and what it cost him.
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926). The other great American first-person novel of those years, with another narrator who is hiding things.