The Great Gatsby & This Side of Paradise recap

The Great Gatsby follows Nick Carraway into the wealthy Long Island world of Jay Gatsby, who built a fortune and an extravagant public identity to recover his former love Daisy Buchanan. Daisy will not abandon her husband Tom. After she kills Tom's mistress Myrtle while driving Gatsby's car, Gatsby takes the blame, and Myrtle's husband George kills him before taking his own life. Nick arranges Gatsby's nearly empty funeral and leaves the East, repelled by the destruction Tom and Daisy evade. This Side of Paradise traces Amory Blaine from a privileged, self-dramatizing childhood through Princeton, war, love affairs, and financial decline. Rosalind Connage rejects marriage to him because he is poor; later relationships also fail. Amory protects Alec Connage during a scandal, loses his remaining inheritance, and learns of Monsignor Darcy's death. Penniless and stripped of the roles through which he defined himself, he returns toward Princeton with a harder-won awareness of who he is.

In 1922, Nick Carraway moves from the Midwest to West Egg, Long Island, to enter the bond business. Across the bay live his cousin Daisy, her forceful husband Tom Buchanan, and their friend Jordan Baker. Nick sees that the Buchanans' polished home conceals strain, including Tom's infidelity. Tom later takes Nick through the bleak industrial valley where George Wilson runs a garage and introduces him to George's wife Myrtle, Tom's mistress. A drunken gathering in a New York apartment ends with Tom striking Myrtle. Back in West Egg, Nick attends one of the immense parties at his neighbor's mansion and finally meets the host, Jay Gatsby, a courteous man surrounded by rumors.

Gatsby tells Nick grand stories about his past, though his connections to gambler Meyer Wolfsheim suggest a less respectable source for his fortune. Jordan reveals that Gatsby and Daisy fell in love before the war and that he bought his house to be near her. At Gatsby's request, Nick arranges their reunion. The meeting begins awkwardly but revives their intimacy, and Gatsby displays his mansion as proof that he has become worthy of the future he imagined with her. Daisy and Tom attend a later party, where Tom's hostility and Daisy's discomfort expose the limits of Gatsby's dream. Gatsby nevertheless insists that the intervening years can be erased and expects Daisy to choose him completely.

At the Plaza Hotel, Gatsby forces a confrontation, but Daisy cannot truthfully say that she never loved Tom. Driving back, Daisy strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson in Gatsby's car; Gatsby lets others assume he was driving and waits outside Daisy's house to protect her. Tom tells the distraught George Wilson that the car belongs to Gatsby. George shoots Gatsby in his pool and then kills himself. Daisy and Tom leave town without offering help. Almost none of Gatsby's former guests attend his funeral, leaving Nick and Gatsby's father among the few mourners. Nick breaks with Jordan and returns to the Midwest, concluding that Gatsby's extraordinary hope was destroyed by a wealthy class able to cause damage and retreat from its consequences.

The second novel begins with Amory Blaine's privileged childhood. His sophisticated mother Beatrice carries him through a life of travel and adult society, encouraging his precocious self-regard. After an uneven education at home and in Minneapolis, Amory attends preparatory school, where he tries to convert intelligence and charm into popularity. Monsignor Darcy, a priest close to Beatrice, becomes the adviser who most clearly understands him. Amory heads toward Princeton convinced that college will provide a grand setting for the identity he has been rehearsing.

At Princeton, Amory pursues social standing, literary recognition, athletics, and romance. He forms friendships with Alec Connage and others, joins campus publications, and learns how quickly confidence depends on rank within the university's clubs and circles. His courtship of Isabelle Borgé collapses when the romantic pose surrounding it gives way to irritation and embarrassment. The death of the admired Dick Humbird in an automobile accident punctures Amory's ideal of effortless superiority. Burne Holiday's rejection of campus conventions also challenges him to distinguish genuine conviction from performance. By the end of his Princeton period, Amory has gained experience but not the stable identity he expected, and military service interrupts his generation's passage into adulthood.

After wartime service, Amory returns to a changed New York and meets Alec's younger sister Rosalind. Their attraction is immediate, and Amory's romantic ambition briefly finds an equal in her wit and confidence. He works in advertising but dislikes the compromise of ordinary employment. Although Rosalind loves him, she is unwilling to accept the insecurity of marriage without money. She ends their engagement and chooses a wealthier future. Amory responds with a prolonged period of drinking and aimlessness. The loss strips away another version of himself: the triumphant lover whose intensity should have been enough to overcome material limits.

Amory's effort to recover from Rosalind takes him through further work, reflection, and a summer relationship with Eleanor Savage in Maryland. Eleanor matches his intelligence and appetite for emotional drama, but their intimacy remains unstable and cannot provide either of them with a lasting direction. Amory becomes more skeptical of the romantic language through which he has repeatedly enlarged his experiences. At the same time, money and inherited status are becoming less secure, forcing him to consider what remains when admiration, love, and social position no longer organize his life.

When Alec faces discovery with a woman in a hotel room, Amory takes responsibility for the situation and accepts the public scandal, sacrificing his own reputation to protect his friend. His family's investments fail, leaving him with almost no income, and the death of Monsignor Darcy removes his most important mentor. Traveling toward Princeton, Amory debates socialism and inherited privilege with a wealthy motorist, expressing a new political awareness formed by war and disillusionment. He reaches the university with little money and no romance, career, fortune, or guiding elder to define him. The novel closes with Amory recognizing that, after so many borrowed identities have fallen away, he at least has begun to understand himself.

The Great Gatsby ends after Daisy, driving Gatsby's car, kills Myrtle Wilson and lets Gatsby protect her by accepting the appearance of responsibility. Tom directs the grieving George Wilson toward Gatsby; George shoots Gatsby in his pool and then kills himself. Daisy and Tom leave without attending the funeral. Nick, disgusted by their carelessness and by the emptiness surrounding Gatsby's wealth, ends his relationship with Jordan and returns to the Midwest. In This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine loses Rosalind because she will not accept poverty, fails to find lasting connection with Eleanor, and sacrifices his reputation to shield Alec from a hotel scandal. His inherited money disappears, Monsignor Darcy dies, and the identities supplied by wealth, Princeton, romance, and mentorship fall away. Walking toward Princeton with almost no money, Amory argues for socialist change with a wealthy driver, then reaches the campus recognizing that self-knowledge is the one possession left to him.