The Great Gatsby Characters, Explained (Spoiler-Free)

The Great Gatsby runs on a small, perfectly cut cast: a narrator who insists he's honest, a millionaire built of rumors, and two marriages wired to explode. Here's who everyone is — as the book introduces them, with what's worth watching for, and without the plot's second half, which this novel guards more jealously than almost any classic. (Reading it with a spoiler-safe companion exists for exactly this cast: "wait, who is Jordan again?" has a safe answer at every page.)

The principals first, then the supporting cast, then how to keep the households straight.

The narrator and the title character

Nick Carraway — the narrator: a Midwesterner newly arrived in New York to learn bonds, renting the small house next to a mansion. Everything in the book reaches you through Nick, and his opening claim — that he reserves judgment — is the first thing to test against what he actually does. Jay Gatsby — the neighbor: owner of the mansion, host of colossal parties he barely attends, subject of contradictory rumors (war hero? spy? killer?) that the book lets circulate deliberately. His introduction is engineered as a delay — you hear the parties before you meet the man — and the gap between the rumors and the person is the novel's first great effect. What he wants, and how long he has wanted it, is the plot; no more here.

The Buchanans and their orbit

Daisy Buchanan — Nick's cousin: charming, moneyed, famous for a voice everyone tries and fails to describe (one character's eventual description of it is the book's most quoted line about wealth). Tom Buchanan — her husband: old money, ex-football star, physically imposing and casually brutal, introduced mid-monologue about a racist book he's misunderstood — Fitzgerald hands you the verdict in the first dinner scene. Jordan Baker — Daisy's friend: a professional golfer, cool and modern, who becomes Nick's guide to the plot's backstory and something more; the rumor attached to her (a cheating scandal) is worth holding onto, since the book pairs her with a narrator obsessed with honesty.

The valley of ashes

Between the mansions and Manhattan lies the book's third location and its second marriage. Myrtle Wilson — vital, hungry for the life across the tracks, and Tom's mistress (the book states this by chapter 2; it's setup, not spoiler). George Wilson — her husband: a faded garage owner, one of the few characters the novel treats without irony. Above their world stare the bespectacled eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg — a fading billboard the book keeps returning to until it accumulates the force of a full motif.

The edges of the cast

Meyer Wolfsheim — Gatsby's business associate, who wears human molars as cufflinks and is said to have fixed the 1919 World Series: the underworld made visible for exactly two scenes, which is all the book needs. Owl Eyes — an unnamed party guest astonished to find Gatsby's library books are real: a two-page character who states the novel's central question (what here is real?) better than anyone. Keeping it all straight is simple geography: Nick and Gatsby in West Egg (new money), the Buchanans in East Egg (old money), the Wilsons in the ashes between — and every plot movement in the book is a crossing of those lines.

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