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In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.’
In the opening words of The Great Gatsby, its narrator, Nick, recalls some sage words that his father spoke to him when he was a boy in the Midwest. His father’s advice is essentially about class and behavior, which will figure prominently in the novel. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Theme: Class (the first Chapter 1 quote).
....in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon....
Early in the novel, Nick lets us know that he’s always been the kind of person in whom others feel comfortable confiding. This will certainly be evident as the novel unfolds, as Gatsby, Tom, and others will instinctively trust Nick with their deepest secrets. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Character: Nick Carraway (the first Chapter 1 quote).
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
Here, Nick once again references advice he received from his father about class and behavior. Nick’s use of the word “snobbishly” here in relation to his father and himself can easily be misunderstood, as is discussed in a deeper explanation of this passage in Quotes by Theme: Class (the second Chapter 1 quote).
When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.
This early mention of Gatsby by Nick hints at the fact that Nick’s attachment to the title character is so great that it will outweigh his deep dislike of the trappings of wealth and privilege that Gatsby epitomizes in so many ways.
Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
Early in Chapter 1, Nick contrasts East Egg and West Egg, the neighboring communities where much of the action of the novel will take place. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Setting: East Egg and West Egg (the first Chapter 1 quote).
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming-pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion.
Nick’s geographical discursion continues with a description of West Egg, including Gatsby’s enormous mansion. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Setting: East Egg and West Egg (the second Chapter 1 quote).
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago . . .
. . .Their [Tom and Daisy’s] house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon . . .
In these two thematically linked passages from Chapter 1, Nick describes the more fashionable East Egg, particularly the mansion belonging to his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan. This passage is further anlayzed in Quotes by Setting: East Egg and West Egg (the third Chapter 1 quote).
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
In his first description of Jay Gatsby, Nick discusses the title character’s charisma and his ability to make others feel hopeful. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Character: Jay Gatsby (the Chapter 1 quote).
I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew.
This allusion-laden quote from Chapter 1 hints at Nick’s complicated and sometimes seemingly contradictory attitudes about wealth. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Character: Nick Carraway (the second Chapter 1 quote).
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.
Here, Nick introduces the novel’s antagonist, Tom Buchanan, who is married to Nick’s cousin Daisy. The scathing tone of these comments is typical of all the observations Nick will make about Tom throughout the novel. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Character: Tom Buchanan (the first Chapter 1 quote).
Why they came east I don’t know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
In this early criticism of Tom Buchanan, Nick focuses on what he sees as Tom’s aimlessness in life. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Theme: The American Dream (the first Chapter 1 quote).
Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
Here, Nick describes Tom’s hulking physical presence in terms that convey more than a hint of menace. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Character: Tom Buchanan (the second Chapter 1 quote).
‘I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.”
Daisy Buchanan’s first words in the novel offer up at least two riddles. First, is the disfluency of her speech natural or is it an affectation? Second, if Daisy is genuinely happy to see Nick, why doesn’t she just say so—without hyperbole or irony? This passage is further explained in in Quotes by Character: Daisy Buchanan (the first Chapter 1 quote).
It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
Nick offers further observations about Daisy’s style of speech. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Character: Daisy Buchanan (the second Chapter 1 quote).
‘You live in West Egg,’ she remarked contemptuously. ‘I know somebody there.’
"I don’t know a single—'
‘You must know Gatsby.’
‘Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. ‘What Gatsby?’
Daisy’s snobbishness about the less fashionable West Egg are on display when Nick startles her by referencing Gatsby. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Setting: East Egg and West Egg (the fourth Chapter 1 quote).
‘You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,’ I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. ‘Can’t you talk about crops or something?’
At his reunion with his cousin Daisy in Chapter 1, Nick makes this playful reference to his Midwestern roots as he takes in the opulence of Daisy and Tom’s lifestyle. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Theme: Class (the fourth Chapter 1 quote).
"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"
"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
This passage further reinforces Tom's brutishness, as he recommends a racist, eugenicist book to an astonished Nick. (The book’s title is not real, but it represents an actual book published in 1920 that is discussed in Allusions under Chapter 1.) This passage is further explained in Quotes by Character: Tom Buchanan (the third Chapter 1 quote).
It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
In this important quote from Chapter 1, Daisy tells Tom and Jordan that she hopes her infant daughter will not be smart—presumably because she recognizes that they are living in a society that doesn’t appreciate intelligence in women, and in fact rejects it. This passage is further explained in Famous Quotes Explained (the first quote).
‘You see I think everything's terrible anyhow,’ she went on in a convinced way. ‘Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.’ Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. ‘Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!’
Immediately after her “beautiful little fool” quote, Daisy describes her cynicism about the world, which she claims is typical of the rich. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Theme: Class (the third quote).
As for Tom, the fact that he ‘had some woman in New York’ was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
Near the end of Chapter 1, Nick interprets the revelation that Tom is having an affair and his expression of concerns about the future of the white race as evidence that Tom—now many years out from his successes as a star football player at Yale—is an increasingly dissatisfied person. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Character: Tom Buchanan (the fourth Chapter 1 quote).
[H]e stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.
Chapter 1 concludes with the first sighting of Gatsby—he's reaching towards the Green Light, which is symbolic of his feelings of incompleteness despite his massive wealth. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Symbol: The Green Light (the Chapter 1 quote) and in Quotes by Theme: The American Dream (the second Chapter 1 quote).
