The Great Gatsby Ch 1 Summary

The narrator of The Great Gatsby is a young man named Nick Carraway. He starts off the story by talking about himself, stating that he learned from his father to reserve judgment about other people, because if he holds them up to his own moral standards, he will misunderstand them. He sees himself as a highly moral and highly tolerant individual. He briefly mentions the hero of his story, Gatsby, saying that Gatsby represented everything he scorns, but that he exempts Gatsby completely from his usual judgments. Gatsby’s personality was nothing short of “gorgeous.”

Nick arrives in New York in 1922, where he moved to work in the bond business,like most of his generation and rented a house on a part of Long Island called West Egg. Unlike the old-fashioned, aristocratic East Egg, West Egg is home to the “new money,” those who, have recently built their fortunes and have neither social connections or the refinement to move among the East Egg set. West Egg is characterized by lavish displays of wealth and garish poor taste, the “old money”. Nick’s comparatively modest West Egg house is next door to Gatsby’s mansion, a sprawling Gothic monstrosity.
Nick is unlike his fellow West Egg neighbours; whereas they lack the social connections he has, Nick graduated from Yale and has many connections on East Egg. One night, he drives out to East Egg to have dinner with his cousin Daisy and her husband, Tom Buchanan, someone. Tom, a burly man, greets Nick on the porch. Inside, Daisy lounges and chats on the couch with her friend Jordan Baker, a golfer, who seems to be perpetually bored when met by Nick.
Tom tries to get everyone interested in a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by a man named Goddard. The book espouses racist, white-supremacist attitudes that Tom seems to find convincing. Daisy teases Tom about the book but is interrupted when Tom leaves the room to take a phone call. Daisy follows him, and Jordan informs Nick that the call is from Tom’s mistress in New York.
After they have dinner, everyone goes they're seperate ways. Jordan wants to go to bed because she has a golf tournament the next day. As Nick leaves, Tom and Daisy tease that they would like for him to take pursue a relationship withh Jordan.
When Nick arrives home, he sees Gatsby for the first time, an enigmatic young man standing on his lawn with his arms reaching out toward the dark water. Nick looks out at the water, but all he can see is a distant green light that might mark the end of a dock.