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.
Between West Egg and New York, the motor road clings to the railroad as if fleeing something. That something is the valley of ashes—a desolate stretch where cinders and dust have hardened into ridges and hollows, where the shapes of chimneys and sheds emerge from the gloom, and where men the colour of soot move like sleepwalkers through a perpetual haze. Over this wasteland broods a faded billboard: the enormous, bespectacled eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, their blue irises dulled by weather, staring down with an empty, unblinking judgment. These eyes, haunting witnesses to the moral decay below, seem to hold a permanent, sorrowful vigil over the scene.
The train stops here, and Tom Buchanan, having drunk at lunch, grabs Nick Carraway’s elbow and orders him off. He leads Nick across a whitewashed fence and along a road beneath those watching eyes to a small yellow-brick garage. Inside, the place is shabby and dim. The proprietor, George Wilson, appears from an office, wiping his hands on a rag—a blond, anaemic man whose hope flickers weakly at the sight of Tom. Tom makes idle talk about a car he’s supposedly selling, but his real purpose is elsewhere. Then Myrtle Wilson fills the doorway.
She is in her thirties, solidly built, yet she carries herself with a fierce, sensual assurance that makes her husband seem like a shadow. A smouldering energy radiates from her. She greets Tom with open familiarity, ignoring George completely, and in a low voice arranges to meet him in the city. George, wiping dust from his suit, believes she is visiting her sister. Tom’s cruelty is evident in his casual contempt; he later explains to Nick that Wilson is “so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive,” a truth the mechanic remains ignorant of as he stands there, hopeful and defeated.
Myrtle travels in a separate train car—a small nod to the sensibilities of East Egg. In Manhattan, she begins a deliberate shedding of her garage-wife identity. At a newsstand she buys a society magazine and a film journal; in a drugstore, cold cream and perfume. Then she insists on a dog, and from an old man’s basket selects an Airedale puppy. By taxi they ride to a cramped apartment on 158th Street, which Myrtle enters as if claiming a throne, her regal air a conscious performance of her new role.
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