The Great Gatsby PDF
Characters of The Great Gatsby
Jay Gatsby
Gatsby is a young man who manages to attain incredible wealth even after spending his childhood in rural North Dakota. However, his path to success is different from clean, honest work. He is involved in illegal activities, such as bootlegging and securities fraud.
His desire for wealth is evident from a young age. He could not tolerate the poverty he experienced in his childhood and dropped out of St. Olaf College after just two weeks because he found it unbearable to work as a janitor to pay for his tuition.
His desire for wealth was always present, but his love for Daisy Buchanan drove him to make massive wealth. He met her while serving in the military in Louisville. He was immediately enchanted by her luxurious aura, grace, and charm. To impress her, he lied about his background to make himself appear worthy of her.
She promised to wait for him while he left for the first world war. But she then gets married to Tom Buchanan, a wealthy man, in 1919. This didn’t deter Gatsby from pursuing his love for Daisy. He dedicated himself to winning her back. Using his newly acquired fortune, he purchases a mansion on West Egg and hosts lavish parties each week, hoping to impress Daisy.
Nick Carraway
In the novel, author F. Scott Fitzgerald uses two characters to represent different parts of his personality. Gatsby embodies the flashy celebrity who chases wealth to impress the woman he loves. At the same time, Nick represents the quiet and introspective Midwesterner who feels out of place in the extravagant East.
He is a young man from Minnesota who came to New York in 1922 to learn about the bond business. He lives right next door to Gatsby in the West Egg district of Long Island. Additionally, he is Daisy’s cousin, which allows him to observe and participate in the rekindled romance between Daisy and Gatsby.
He is the perfect choice to recount the events of the summer of 1922 because he has a close relationship with the two main characters. He is able to provide a unique perspective on the world of the wealthy in the novel.
The choice of Nick as the narrator is the best because of his personality. In Chapter 1, he reveals himself to be a tolerant, open-minded, and quiet individual who is also an attentive listener. Nick’s approachable demeanor leads others to share their secrets, and Gatsby, in particular, begins to trust him.
Despite being a secondary character, he plays a critical role in the story. He functions as an observer and commentator rather than taking a leading role.
His character becomes complicated as he navigates his conflicting feelings about life on the East Coast. He is initially attracted to the fast-paced, exciting lifestyle of New York but soon comes to see its darker side. This inner conflict is highlighted by his romantic relationship with Jordan Baker, who embodies both the alluring qualities and the deceitful tendencies of the East Coast elite. While he is attracted to her vivaciousness and sophistication, he is also disturbed by her lack of empathy and honesty.
Daisy Buchanan
Daisy is a stunning young lady from Louisville, Kentucky. She happens to be Nick’s cousin and the apple of Gatsby’s eye. She was quite a popular figure among the military officers near her residence, including Jay Gatsby.
Gatsby was smitten with Daisy and didn’t hesitate to lie about his background to win her affection. He spun a web of lies, portraying himself as a member of a wealthy family to prove his worthiness to her. And it worked. She fell for Gatsby.
She promised to wait for him until he returned from the war, but fate had other plans. In 1919, she decided to marry Tom Buchanan instead. Tom was a young man from a wealthy and aristocratic family.
Following his return from World War I in 1919, Gatsby becomes fixated on winning back Daisy and dedicates his life to acquiring immense wealth through criminal activity to impress her. To Gatsby, Daisy embodies perfection – the epitome of charm, wealth, sophistication, and grace that he had longed for since his childhood in North Dakota.
However, Daisy falls short of Gatsby’s ideals in reality. She is undoubtedly beautiful but also fickle, bored, and sarcastic. Nick, the novel’s narrator, describes her as a careless person who always smashes things up.
She chooses her husband, Tom, over Gatsby in Chapter 7 and allows Gatsby to take the blame for killing Myrtle Wilson, even though she was the one driving the car.
Not only this, she and Tom move away without leaving a forwarding address, making it clear that Gatsby’s love is ultimately unrequited.
She is the character who is in love with money only.
Tom Buchanan
He is a complex character primarily characterized by his physical and mental hardness. His large, muscle-bound body reflects the “enormous power” he developed as a college athlete. His physicality is not just for show. It was demonstrated when he accidentally hurt Daisy’s finger, causing her to call him a “brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen…”
But his brutish personality is not limited to his physical appearance. He is also mentally inflexible, sticking to his beliefs and opinions even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
His physical and mental hardness combine to create a personality that uses threats and violence to maintain control.
Jordan Baker
Jordan Baker is a captivating character who allures Nick from her first appearance. As a member of the wealthy upper class, she has quickly risen to social prominence as a famous golfer. Despite her success, Jordan’s affluence is built upon a foundation of lies. She cheated to win her first major golf tournament and has a habit of being untruthful.
Nick immediately senses her nature when he first encounters her lounging on a couch with Daisy in Chapter 1. He describes her as motionless, with her chin raised. Her beauty and pose are striking, but he also detects a hint of fragility in her appearance, as if she’s posing.
He observes that dishonesty is her way of keeping the world at arm’s length, protecting herself from its cruelties.
Myrtle Wilson
Myrtle Wilson dreams of a life beyond the life that she already lives. She yearns to escape her unhappy marriage to George, a dull man she mistakenly believed was of good breeding. The couple lives in a run-down garage in the dismal “valley of ashes,” a working-class area between New York City and the suburbs of East and West Egg.
She yearns for a better life by becoming the mistress of the wealthy Tom Buchanan. He showers her with gifts and rents her an apartment in Manhattan, where she can pretend to be a part of the upper class. There, she also hosts extravagant parties.
She believes that Tom loves her and would marry her if only Daisy would divorce him. However, Nick understands that he sees her as just another possession and will never marry her. This dynamic makes Myrtle a more sympathetic character.
Her life is full of hardship and misery. She is a victim not only of her circumstances but also of the callousness of those around her.
Her husband locks her up when he suspects her of infidelity, further fueling her desperation to escape. Her attempt to do so leads to her tragic death when she mistakes Daisy’s car for Tom’s and is hit while running in front of it. Daisy doesn’t even stop to check on her, and the characters from the lower class – including Gatsby – are left to pay the ultimate price for the moral failings of the upper class.
George Wilson
Summary of The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway was a young man with dreams of learning about the bonds business and moved to New York in the summer of 1922. He rented a house in the West Egg, an area inhabited by the newly wealthy who were trying to make a name for themselves in high society. Though the community was wealthy, it was not fashionable.
Nick’s neighbor in West Egg was a man named Jay Gatsby. He was a mystery to most people, and no one knew where he came from or how he had made his fortune.
However, everyone knew about the lavish parties he threw every Saturday night in his enormous Gothic mansion.
Nick was drawn to Gatsby’s parties, where he saw people from all walks of life, including the rich and famous. However, despite the grandeur of the parties, Nick sensed that Gatsby was always searching for something more that he could not quite grasp.
Nick was not like the others in West Egg. He had completed his education at Yale and had social connections in the fashionable East Egg area of Long Island. East Egg was home to the established upper class, unlike West Egg, which was home to the new money.
One evening, he drove to East Egg for dinner with his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband, Tom. At dinner, Nick was introduced to Jordan Baker, a beautiful young woman with whom Nick began a romantic relationship.
During his time with them, he learned about the darker side of their marriage. Jordan told him about Tom’s lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the Valley of Ashes, a gray industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City.
After this revelation, Tom takes him to New York City to meet Myrtle at a vulgar and gaudy party in the apartment that Tom kept for Myrtle. She begins to taunt him about Daisy. In a rage, Tom broke her nose, causing a chaotic scene.
As the summer of 1922 progresses, he finally receives an invitation to Gatsby’s legendary parties. At the party, he encounters Jordan, and then they meet Gabtsy. He is a young man with a remarkable smile who affects an English accent and calls everyone “old sport.”
Through Jordan, he learns more about his neighbor. Gatsby told Jordan he knew Daisy and had been in love with her since 1917. He spends countless nights staring at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. His lavish lifestyle and parties, which are the talk of the town, are nothing but an attempt to impress her and capture her attention. He now wants Nick to arrange a reunion with Daisy, but he fears she will refuse to see him if she finds out that he is still in love with her.
Nick agrees and invites her to his house for tea without revealing that Gatsby will also be there. Initially, everything was awkward in this reunion, but then, Daisy and Gatsby rekindled their connection. Their love was reawakened, and they started their relationship again.
As time passes, Tom Buchanan becomes suspicious of his wife’s and Gatsby’s relationship. During lunch at the Buchanans’ residence, Gatsby’s eyes are fixated on Daisy with an intense passion. This leads Tom to realize that Gatsby is in love with her.
Tom feels deeply hurt by the thought of his wife being unfaithful, even when he has an extramarital affair. He quickly takes action and forces everyone to go to New York City. After reaching there, he confronts Gatsby at the luxurious Plaza Hotel about his affair with Daisy.
During the confrontation, he confidently declares that he and Daisy share a deep history that Gatsby could never understand. He then shocks everyone by revealing that Gatsby’s wealth is derived from illegal activities such as bootlegging alcohol. This revelation causes Daisy to understand that she belongs to Tom, not Gatsby. He then sends her back to East Egg with Gatsby in an attempt to prove to himself and others that Gatsby is no match for him.
After this, Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive to the Valley of Ashes. As tensions between Tom and Gatsby come to a head, tragedy strikes. During a drive through the Valley of Ashes, Gatsby’s car hits and kills Myrtle. In a panic, they rush back to Long Island, where Gatsby reveals to Nick that Daisy was the one driving the car at the time of the accident, but he is willing to take the blame for her. The next day, Tom informs Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was driving the car that killed his wife. Enraged and devastated, George seeks revenge and heads to Gatsby’s mansion, where he finds him in his pool and shoots him.
Nick has had enough of the superficiality and moral decay of the wealthy elite on the East Coast. After staging a small funeral for his friend Gatsby, he ends his relationship with Jordan and leaves town.
As he reflects on Gatsby’s life, he comes to a sobering realization about the American dream. He sees that the pursuit of wealth and material success has corrupted this ideal, just as it had corrupted Gatsby’s dream of love with Daisy. He also believes that the era of dreaming is over.
And this is how the story ends.
How to get The Great Gatsby pdf?
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