The Great Gatsby

Nick Carraway narrates everything in The Great Gatsby. He comes from the American Midwest and decides to try his luck in New York's financial world in 1922. He rents a modest little house in West Egg, Long Island, right next to a huge mansion that nobody quite knows the owner of.

Across the bay is East Egg, home to old-money people, the kind whose wealth has been in the family for generations. West Egg is the neighborhood of the new rich, people who made their fortunes fast and still carry the air of those who weren't born into that world: the money looks similar, but the respect from the neighbors doesn't.

Nick is a cousin of Daisy Buchanan, who lives in East Egg with her husband, Tom. That family tie connects the two ends of the story, because Nick becomes the neighbor of the mysterious Gatsby and a relative of the woman he never forgot.

The mansion next to Nick's house belongs to Jay Gatsby, a man nobody seems to really know, but who every weekend fills his property with people drinking, dancing, and eating for free until dawn. The party is enormous, but the host almost never shows up in the middle of the crowd.

The curious thing is that a good share of the guests weren't truly invited: people simply show up, because word got around that at Gatsby's house the booze never runs out during Prohibition, when alcohol was banned in the United States. It's like someone dropping into the neighborhood group chat that there's a free-for-all barbecue every Saturday, with no one checking at the door.

The guests love to speculate about Gatsby: that he killed a man, that he's the nephew of a German general, that he studied at Oxford, that he's a spy. Nobody knows the truth, and that feeds even more rumors, because a strange reputation is also a way of getting the attention of one specific person, across the water.

Before Nick knows anything about Gatsby's life, he sees his neighbor alone in the garden at night, stretching his arms toward the dark water. Far off, at the end of the Buchanans' dock, a little green light blinks. Gatsby stands there, quiet, staring at that point of light like someone looking at something he lost.

That green light is the most famous symbol in the book. It represents Daisy, but also everything Gatsby wants to reach and is never sure he'll get close to: the love from before the war, the money, the social standing he never had by birth.

It's like saving up to buy your own home: the goal seems close, you can see its light up ahead, but the real distance is usually greater than it looks from afar.