The Great Gatsby
Scene #1 · Chapter 1
Nick Carraway dines at Tom and Daisy Buchanan's East Egg mansion, where he encounters the couple's wealth and restlessness. Daisy speaks in affected, musical tones and mentions her cynicism about life, telling Nick she hopes her daughter will be "a beautiful little fool." Tom receives a phone call during dinner, and Jordan Baker reveals to Nick that Tom has "some woman in New York." The evening ends with Nick glimpsing Daisy and Tom in tense conversation, and later he sees a distant figure—Gatsby—stretching his arms toward a green light across the bay.
This dinner establishes the moral emptiness beneath the Buchanans' glamorous surface and introduces the novel's central tension between old money and new aspirations. Daisy's comment about her daughter reveals her awareness that women in her world survive through willful ignorance. The green light Nick observes becomes the novel's central symbol of Gatsby's longing for an unattainable past.
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.
Chapter 1 · Narrator
“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.”
Chapter 1 · Daisy Buchanan
—he 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.
Chapter 1 · Narrator
They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.
Chapter 1 · Narrator
“Tom’s got some woman in New York.”
Chapter 1 · Jordan Baker