Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner bondsman, rents a cottage in West Egg next to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. Drawn into the world of his cousin Daisy and her brutish husband Tom, Nick becomes the confidant for Gatsby's singular, five-year obsession: to win back Daisy and recreate a perfect past, a dream that ultimately collides with reality and ends in violence.
After the burial, Nick’s thoughts turn irrevocably westward. One of his most vivid memories is of Christmas trains pulling out of Chicago into the winter night, the snow stretching beside the tracks, the sharp, wild brace of the air. That is his Middle West—the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark. He sees now that this has been a story of the West after all: Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and he, all Westerners, subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. Even when the East excited him most, it held a quality of distortion. West Egg figures in his dreams as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred grotesque houses under a sullen sky, four solemn men carrying a drunken woman into the wrong house, no one knowing or caring her name. After Gatsby’s death, the East is haunted for Nick like that, distorted beyond correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves is in the air, he decides to return home.
Before leaving, one awkward duty remains. He meets Jordan Baker. She lies still in a big chair, dressed for golf, her hair the color of an autumn leaf. She tells him without comment she is engaged to another man. Nick pretends surprise. She suddenly says, “Nevertheless you did throw me over on the telephone. I felt a little dizzy for a while.” She recalls their conversation about driving: “You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.” Nick is thirty, he says, five years too old to lie to himself and call it honor. They shake hands. He turns away angry, half in love, and tremendously sorry.
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