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The Spark Notes Great Gatsby

Sparknotes

Chapter One

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave mesome advice that I've been turning over in my mind eversince.

    "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me,"just remember that all the people in this world haven'thad the advantages that you've had."

    He didn't say any more but we've always been unusuallycommunicative in a reserved way and I understood that hemeant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'minclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has openedup many curious natures to me and also made me the victimof not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick todetect and attach itself to this quality when it appears ina normal person, and so it came about that in college I wasunjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privyto the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of theconfidences were unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep,preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by someunmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiveringon the horizon--for the intimate revelations of young menor at least the terms in which they express them areusually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I amstill a little afraid of missing something if I forgetthat, as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishlyrepeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelledout unequally at birth.

    And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come tothe admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be foundedon the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certainpoint I don't care what it's founded on. When I came backfrom the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world tobe in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; Iwanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpsesinto the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives hisname to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby whorepresented everything for which I have an unaffectedscorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successfulgestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, someheightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if hewere related to one of those intricate machines thatregister earthquakes ten thousand miles away. Thisresponsiveness had nothing to do with that flabbyimpressionability which is dignified under the name of the"creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift forhope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found inany other person and which it is not likely I shall everfind again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; itis what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in thewake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interestin the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

    My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in thismiddle-western city for three generations. The Carrawaysare something of a clan and we have a tradition that we'redescended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actualfounder of my line was my grandfather's brother who camehere in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War andstarted the wholesale hardware business that my fathercarries on today.

    I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to looklike him--with special reference to the rather hard-boiledpainting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated fromNew Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after myfather, and a little later I participated in that delayedTeutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed thecounter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.Instead of being the warm center of the world themiddle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of theuniverse--so I decided to go east and learn the bondbusiness. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so Isupposed it could support one more single man. All my auntsand uncles talked it over as if they were choosing aprep-school for me and finally said "Why--ye-es" with verygrave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for ayear and after various delays I came east, permanently, Ithought, in the spring of twenty-two.

    The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but itwas a warm season and I had just left a country of widelawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the officesuggested that we take a house together in a commuting townit sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weatherbeaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at thelast minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I wentout to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had himfor a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and aFinnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast andmuttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

    It was lonely for a day or so until one morning someman, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

    "How do you get to West Egg Village?" he askedhelplessly.

    I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. Iwas a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He hadcasually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

    And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leavesgrowing on the trees--just as things grow in fast movies--Ihad that familiar conviction that life was beginning overagain with the summer.

    There was so much to read for one thing and so much finehealth to be pulled down out of the young breath-givingair. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit andinvestment securities and they stood on my shelf in red andgold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold theshining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenasknew. And I had the high intention of reading many otherbooks besides. I was rather literary in college--one year Iwrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials forthe "Yale News"--and now I was going to bring back all suchthings into my life and become again that most limited ofall specialists, the "well-rounded" man. This isn't just anepigram--life is much more successfully looked at from asingle window, after all.

    It was a matter of chance that I should have rented ahouse in one of the strangest communities in North America.It was on that slender riotous island which extends itselfdue east of New York and where there are, among othernatural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twentymiles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical incontour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out intothe most domesticated body of salt water in the WesternHemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.They are not perfect ovals--like the egg in the Columbusstory they are both crushed flat at the contact end--buttheir physical resemblance must be a source of perpetualconfusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless amore arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in everyparticular except shape and size.

    I lived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable ofthe two, though this is a most superficial tag to expressthe bizarre and not a little sinister contrast betweenthem. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fiftyyards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge placesthat rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. Theone on my right was a colossal affair by any standard--itwas a factual imitation of...