The Great Gatsby

Key Facts

full title  ·  The Great Gatsby

author  · F. Scott Fitzgerald

type of work  · Novel

genre  · Modernist novel, Jazz Age novel, novel of manners

language  · English

time and place written  · 1923–1924, America and France

date of first publication  · 1925

publisher  · Charles Scribner’s Sons

narrator  · Nick Carraway; Carraway not only narrates the story but implies that he is the book’s author

point of view  · Nick Carraway narrates in both first and third person, presenting only what he himself observes. Nick alternates sections where he presents events objectively, as they appeared to him at the time, with sections where he gives his own interpretations of the story’s meaning and of the motivations of the other characters.

tone  · Nick’s attitudes toward Gatsby and Gatsby’s story are ambivalent and contradictory. At times he seems to disapprove of Gatsby’s excesses and breaches of manners and ethics, but he also romanticizes and admires Gatsby, describing the events of the novel in a nostalgic and elegiac tone.

tense  · Past

setting (time)  · Summer 1922

settings (place)  · Long Island and New York City

protagonist  · Gatsby and/or Nick

major conflict  · Gatsby has amassed a vast fortune in order to win the affections of the upper-class Daisy Buchanan, but his mysterious past stands in the way of his being accepted by her.

rising action  · Gatsby’s lavish parties, Gatsby’s arrangement of a meeting with Daisy at Nick’s

climax  · There are two possible climaxes: Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy in Chapters 5–6; the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom in the Plaza Hotel in Chapter 7.

falling action  · Daisy’s rejection of Gatsby, Myrtle’s death, Gatsby’s murder

themes  · The decline of the American dream, the spirit of the 1920s, the difference between social classes, the role of symbols in the human conception of meaning, the role of the past in dreams of the future

motifs  · The connection between events and weather, the connection between geographical location and social values, images of time, extravagant parties, the quest for wealth

symbols  · The green light on Daisy’s dock, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, the valley of ashes, Gatsby’s parties, East Egg, West Egg

foreshadowing  · The car wreck after Gatsby’s party in Chapter 3, Owl Eyes’s comments about the theatricality of Gatsby’s life, the mysterious telephone calls Gatsby receives from Chicago and Philadelphia