The Great Gatsby takes place in 1922 on Long Island, New York. Wikipedia, Amazon and the Reader's Encyclopedia’s summaries point out and stress that this book is the quintessence of life in the “Jazz Age” or the roaring 20s in America. Besides the fact that this is clearly an interpretation, I infer that the novel will go into great detail about the extravagant and lavish lifestyles of the wealthy in that time period. The narrator of the story is Nick Carraway, pointed out only by enotes and the Reader's Encyclopedia, and lives in a small town called West Egg. In addition, those are the only two summaries which include the fact that Nick is the neighbor of the mysterious and extremely wealthy young man named Jay Gatsby. Most sources seem to focus on Mr. gatsby and don’t even acknowledge Nick as a character in the story at all. As soon as Nick rents his house on West Egg, he visits …show more content…
The Reader's Encyclopedia and Wikipedia includes that Jay and Daisy had a romantic past. In an effort to get Daisy’s attention who lives across the bay, Gatsby throws all of these lavish parties in hopes of reuniting with her. He persuades Nick to bring him and Daisy together and Nick complies with Gatsby’s request, and the old lovers rekindle their relationship, which rouses Tom’s suspicions. When Tom confronts the pair, he tries to prove that Gatsby’s wealth comes from an illegal source and that he was a dangerous man. On the way back home from the confrontation, Daisy accidentally hits and kills Tom’s mistress Myrtle when driving Gatsby’s car home. No summaries included details about Myrtle until she was killed, which seems very strange because Tom has an affair of his own while he is accusing his wife of another one. Myrtle’s husband, George thinks that it was Gatsby driving the car and shoots the man and then kills