Spoiler Warning
Spoiler warning before anything else. This is a full summary of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it gives away the whole story, including how it ends. If you have not finished it yet, pause here and come back.
Here is the short version. In the summer of nineteen twenty-two, a young bond salesman named Nick Carraway moves in next to a mystery millionaire named Jay Gatsby, who throws huge parties because he is waiting for one particular guest to walk in. The book has nine chapters, and each one gets its own box on the board.
Every box holds three things. What happens, one tiny quote with its chapter number, and a symbol tag. I am tracking four symbols: the green light, the eyes on the billboard, the valley of ashes, and the cars. The plot comes straight from the text. The readings of the symbols are my opinion.
Chapters 1 and 2: Two Eggs and the Ashes
Chapter one. Nick comes East in the spring of nineteen twenty-two to learn the bond business, and rents a small house on West Egg, next door to Gatsby’s mansion. Across the bay, in East Egg, he has dinner with his cousin Daisy, her husband Tom Buchanan, and a golfer named Jordan Baker. Over that dinner he learns that Tom has another woman in New York, and hears Daisy say she is pretty cynical about everything. Nick opens the book by saying that he tries to reserve judgment, and he also admits that it has a limit.
On the way home, Nick sees a man on the neighboring lawn stretching his arms toward the dark water. It is Gatsby. Far out across the bay, Nick can make out one small light. First symbol tag in the board: the green light. The key line, chapter one: a single green light, minute and far away.
Chapter two is the valley of ashes, a gray dumping ground between the Eggs and New York. Over it hang two huge faded eyes on a billboard, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. Tom drags Nick off the train to meet his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, whose husband George runs the garage there. The afternoon ends in a drunken apartment party, where Tom breaks Myrtle’s nose for saying Daisy’s name. Tags: eyes and valley. Key line, chapter two: the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic.
Chapters 3 and 4: Parties and Lunch
Chapter three is the first Gatsby party. There is an orchestra, a bar, and guests who whisper that the host killed a man, or was a German spy. Nick is one of the few people who was actually invited. In the library he meets a drunk man in enormous owl eyed glasses, amazed that the books are real. Then Nick talks to a polite stranger for several minutes before the stranger says, I’m Gatsby. By the end of the summer, Nick has also learned that Jordan was once accused of moving her golf ball, and that she lies easily, yet he still calls himself one of the few honest people he knows.
As Nick leaves, a new coupe sits in a ditch with a wheel torn off, and the owl eyed man insists he was not driving. Key line, chapter three: people were not invited, they went there. Tags: cars, and in my reading a second pair of watching eyes.
Chapter four. Gatsby drives Nick to the city in his cream colored car and tells a life story with Oxford, Europe and a war medal. At lunch he introduces Meyer Wolfshiem, a gambler who, Gatsby says, fixed the nineteen nineteen World Series, and who wears cuff buttons he calls human molars. Then Tom walks in, and Gatsby vanishes.
That afternoon, at the Plaza, Jordan tells Nick the history. Gatsby knew Daisy in Louisville in nineteen seventeen, and he wants Nick to invite her to tea. Key line, chapter four: Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay. Tag: cars.
Chapters 5 and 6: Tea and the Past
Chapter five is the tea. It rains, Gatsby has Nick’s lawn cut, sends over a greenhouse of flowers, and nearly leaves before Daisy arrives. He leans on a mantel clock and almost knocks it to the floor. Then Nick steps out for half an hour, and when he comes back Gatsby is glowing. Gatsby shows her the house, throws his shirts on the table, and Daisy cries over them. At the end of the afternoon a hired piano player named Klipspringer plays for the two of them.
At the window, Gatsby mentions the green light at the end of her dock. Nick guesses that its huge meaning has just vanished, because Daisy is finally here. Key line, chapter five: now it was again a green light on a dock. Tag: the green light.
Chapter six is the backstory. Gatsby was born James Gatz, of North Dakota, and he renamed himself at seventeen, when he rowed out to the yacht of a rich old miner named Dan Cody. Back in the present, Tom stops by with two riders, and a few days later he and Daisy come to a party. Daisy hates it.
Afterward Gatsby says he wants her to tell Tom she never loved him. Nick says you cannot repeat the past. Key line, chapter six: why of course you can. Symbol tag: none of my four. The symbol track goes quiet here.
Chapter 7: The Hottest Day
Chapter seven is the longest in the book, and it is one hot day. Gatsby has fired his servants. At lunch at the Buchanans’ house, Tom sees how Daisy looks at Gatsby. Gatsby says her voice is full of money. Key line, chapter seven: her voice is full of money.
They all drive to the city, and on the way Tom stops for gas at Wilson’s garage. Wilson, sick, says he is taking his wife West. Myrtle watches from an upstairs window, and the billboard eyes watch above. Tags: eyes and valley.
In a suite at the Plaza, Gatsby says Daisy never loved Tom. Tom answers by exposing the bootlegging, and Daisy breaks, saying she loved them both. Nick mentions only afterward that it is his thirtieth birthday. Tom sends her home with Gatsby, sure that Gatsby has lost.
On the road home, a yellow car hits Myrtle Wilson and does not stop. Later Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was driving, and that he will say he was. Nick looks through a window and sees Tom and Daisy at a kitchen table, talking quietly, like people conspiring. Tag: cars.
Chapters 8 and 9: The Pool and the Funeral
Chapter eight. All night, Gatsby tells Nick the story of how he met Daisy and lost her. On the lawn the next morning Nick shouts to him that he is worth the whole bunch put together. It is the only compliment he ever gave him.
Meanwhile George Wilson, up all night with a neighbor named Michaelis, stares out at the billboard and says, God sees everything. Michaelis tells him it is an advertisement. That afternoon, Wilson makes his way to West Egg. Gatsby is floating on a mattress in his pool when shots are heard. Gatsby is dead, and Wilson’s body is found in the grass nearby. Key line, chapter eight: God sees everything. Tags: eyes, valley, cars.
Chapter nine is the aftermath. Tom and Daisy have left town with no address. Wolfshiem will not come. Gatsby’s father arrives, and shows Nick a boyhood schedule with resolutions to better himself. At the funeral, almost no one comes. Besides a few servants and the postman, the only mourner is the owl eyed man from the library.
Nick ends things with Jordan, who reminds him of what she once said about careless drivers. On Fifth Avenue Tom admits he told Wilson whose car it was, and Nick shakes his hand anyway. Then Nick decides to go back to the Midwest. Key line, chapter nine: they were careless people, Tom and Daisy. Tags: cars, and the green light, which waits for the very last page.
The Symbol Count and My Verdict
Now the count, from the Project Gutenberg text. The nine chapters run about forty-eight thousand words. The phrase green light appears five times, and only in three chapters: once in chapter one, twice in chapter five, and twice in chapter nine. In chapter nine, Nick pictures Gatsby first spotting it, and the book’s last pages say Gatsby believed in the green light.
The name Eckleburg appears seven times: four in chapter two, two in chapter seven and one in chapter eight. The words car, cars and coupe appear ninety-nine times, and forty-four of them are in chapter seven, the crash chapter.
My reading, and it is an opinion. The green light is the dream, and it shrinks the moment Gatsby gets close. The eyes are what people want to be watching, and the book lets Michaelis say they are only an ad. The ashes are where the people who pay live. The cars are the carelessness.
If you are choosing a way to read it, this is a short book that rewards a second pass, because the first chapter already points at the green light and the last chapter ends on it. In my view it is worth reading once for the story and once for the symbols.
Content notes. A woman is killed by a car, there is a shooting, heavy drinking, and an affair. Some characters and the narrator use racist and antisemitic language that the period never questioned.
A note on the text. The book came out in nineteen twenty-five, and Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain and NPR both reported that it entered the public domain in the United States on January first, twenty twenty-one. That is why I could work from the free Project Gutenberg edition, ebook number sixty-four thousand three hundred seventeen.
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