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F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
Substantive revision notes for A-Level English Literature: chapter-by-chapter plot, eight character profiles, six major themes, 1920s context (Jazz Age, Prohibition, the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald and Zelda), 18 key quotations with analysis, the novel's symbolic system, and AQA / OCR / Edexcel-style exam questions with planning notes.
Nick Carraway, the narrator, has moved from the Midwest to West Egg, Long Island, in summer 1922 to learn the bond business. He visits his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan in fashionable East Egg, where he meets the golfer Jordan Baker. Tom takes a phone call from his mistress; Jordan reveals the affair. Returning home, Nick glimpses his mysterious neighbour Jay Gatsby standing on the lawn, arms stretched toward a single green light across the bay.
Key Moments
Tom takes Nick to the Valley of Ashes, the desolate industrial wasteland between West Egg and New York, watched over by the faded billboard of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. Tom collects his mistress Myrtle Wilson, wife of the garage owner George, and the three travel to a vulgar party at a Manhattan apartment Tom keeps for the affair. The evening ends when Myrtle taunts Tom with Daisy's name and he breaks her nose.
Key Moments
Nick attends one of Gatsby's legendary parties for the first time, having been formally invited. He finds an extravagant spectacle of champagne, jazz, and uninvited guests. He meets Gatsby almost by accident, struck by his sudden, formal smile. Rumours about Gatsby circulate: that he killed a man, that he was a German spy. Nick begins a relationship with Jordan Baker.
Key Moments
Gatsby drives Nick into New York in his cream-coloured car and tells an improbable life story: educated at Oxford, family money from the Midwest, war hero. Nick lunches with Gatsby and the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, who fixed the 1919 World Series. That afternoon, Jordan reveals the truth: Gatsby loved Daisy in Louisville in 1917 before the war, and his entire fortune and house exist to win her back. He asks Nick to arrange a tea so he can meet her again.
Key Moments
Nick hosts the reunion. Gatsby is paralysed by nerves; the meeting is awkward until the three move to Gatsby's mansion, where Gatsby shows Daisy his wealth in a display of almost desperate intensity, hurling shirts onto the bed until she weeps. The chapter is the emotional centre of the novel: Gatsby has achieved his dream, but Nick notices that the real Daisy cannot match the version Gatsby has built in five years of imagination.
Key Moments
Nick reveals Gatsby's true origins: he was born James Gatz, the son of poor North Dakota farmers, and reinvented himself at seventeen after meeting the millionaire Dan Cody. Tom and Daisy attend one of Gatsby's parties; Daisy is appalled by the crowd. Afterwards Gatsby insists to Nick that he can repeat the past. Nick's warning — “You can't repeat the past” — is dismissed.
Key Moments
The novel's longest and most violent chapter. On a sweltering day, the group lunches at the Buchanans' before driving to the Plaza Hotel in New York. There Tom confronts Gatsby, exposing him as a bootlegger and demanding Daisy choose. Daisy cannot say she never loved Tom. Driving home, Gatsby's yellow car — with Daisy at the wheel — strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson, who has run into the road thinking the yellow car contains Tom (she had seen him driving it earlier that day). Gatsby resolves to take the blame.
Key Moments
Gatsby tells Nick the full story of his courtship of Daisy in Louisville. The next morning, half-believing she might still call, he takes a swim in his pool. George Wilson, deranged by Myrtle's death and pointed toward Gatsby by Tom, finds him and shoots him, then turns the gun on himself. The chapter ends with the abandoned pool, the floating mattress, and Gatsby's ruined dream.
Key Moments
Two years later, Nick narrates the aftermath. Almost no one attends Gatsby's funeral — not Daisy, not Wolfsheim, only Nick, Owl Eyes, the servants, and Gatsby's father, who arrives with a schedule the boy James Gatz once wrote for self-improvement. Nick breaks with Jordan, encounters Tom on Fifth Avenue and refuses his hand at first, and returns to the Midwest. The novel ends on the beach in front of Gatsby's empty mansion with one of the most famous closing passages in American literature.
Key Moments