The Great Gatsby

About the book

Nick Carraway moves to Long Island and becomes the neighbour of Jay Gatsby, whose lavish parties attract people who know remarkably little about their host. Through family connections and new acquaintances, Nick enters a circle in which wealth makes some desires easy to pursue and their consequences easy to avoid. Gatsby's interest in Daisy Buchanan gives the spectacle a more private purpose. Fitzgerald lets attraction and misgiving coexist in Nick's account, making the narrator's judgments part of the experience rather than an unquestionable guide. Cars, houses, clothes, and parties carry emotional significance as well as social display. The novel examines the wish to make an imagined life real, and the unequal protection that money offers when imagination collides with other people's choices.

• Wealth and privilege
• Longing for the past
• Self-invention

Why read it

For concentrated, evocative prose and a narrator drawn to the very world he is learning to question.

English text