| Nick Caraway | Narrator; trustworthy; lives on West Egg, next to Gatsby |
| Tom Buchanan | Daisy’s husband; cheats on Daisy with Myrtle; insufferable |
| Daisy Fay Buchanan | Tom’s wife; object of desire for Gatsby; also kinda insufferable |
| Pammy Buchanan | Tom and Daisy’s child; irrelevant |
| Jordan Baker | Pro golfer, cheats; gets together with Nick |
| Jay Gatsby (James Gatz) | Titular character; naive, hopeful of repeating the past by being with Daisy |
| George B. Wilson | Myrtle’s husband; owns a garage; kills Gatsby after Daisy hits Myrtle with her car, killing her |
| Myrtle Wilson | George’s wife; cheats on George with Tom (tries to act very upper class/old money, but is pretty tacky); gets hit by Gatsby’s car, though Daisy is driving, and is killed |
| Catherine | Myrtle’s sister; believes in the rumors surrounding Gatsby; knows that Myrtle is cheating on George with Tom |
| Chester McKee | Photographer who attended Tom’s party in New York |
| Lucille McKee | Wife of Chester McKee; claims to be very happy with her marriage when Myrtle laments her own troubles; is given Myrtle’s dress even though it was a gift from Tom |
| “Owl Eyes” | First introduced in the book sitting in Gatsby’s library at his party; surprised that the books are real; in the car accident after the party; only person outside of Nick and Gatsby’s father that attends Gatsby’s funeral |
| Meyer Wolfsheim | Gatsby’s business associate; link to organized crime; professional gambler – fixed the 1919 World Series; helped to build Gatsby’s fortune, though this wealth came through questionable means |
| Ewing Klipspringer | Convivially known as Gatsby’s “boarder”; a representation of those who frequented Gatsby’s parties; a leech |
| Dan Cody | Worldly mentor of Jay Gatsby; took Gatsby under his wing when he was a young man to teach him about living adventurously and pursuing his dreams |
| Ella Kaye | Love interest of Dan Cody; invalidated Cody’s last will in order to get the $25,000 Dan left as inheritance to Jay Gatsby |
| Mr. Sloane | In the group that refuses dinner at Gatsby’s; when Gatsby goes to get his car to have dinner at their house, they leave quickly |
| Michealis | George Wilson’s restauranteur neighbor who comforts Wilson after Myrtle is killed; one of the few charitable people found in the novel |
| Henry C. Gatz | Gatsby’s father who comes from the midwest to bury his son; representative of Gatsby’s humble roots |
| East Egg vs. West Egg | East Egg is the more fashionable of the two; Gatsby and Nick live on West Egg while Daisy and Tom live on East Egg |
| The green light | represents Gatsby’s hopes for the future; could represent Gatsby’s quest for Daisy, but also the more generalized idea of the American Dream |
| The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg | To George, the eyes represent the eyes of God looking down on America; their lack of concrete significance lends itself to the essential meaninglessness of the world and the arbitrariness of the mental process by which we as humans associate meanings to objects |
| The Merton College Library | Literally the library at Oxford, but that is what Nick refers to Gatsby;s library as |
| The Black Sox Scandal of 1919 | Meyer Wolfsheim is connected to this scandal |
| Louisville | The place where Gatsby met Daisy |
| The Oxford (“Oggsford”) man | What Meyer Wolfsheim calls Gatsby |
| The Montenegro Medal | A medal Gatsby claims to have won in war – shows Nick to convince him of his wealth and stature |
| “The Sheik of Araby” | A verse of this song appears in the novel |
| “Old Sport” | What Gatsby calls everyone to solidify his wealthy stature |
| The grail motif | The committing of oneself to chase after a sacred object that one may not even be able to have; i.e., Gatsby to Daisy |
| The Hopalong Cassidy Schedule | Gatsby had written this when he was younger; writes his personal goals to improve (study elocution, do pushups, etc.) |
| The American Dream | The notion that all things were equal in America, and everyone had the same opportunities to be successful and get what they wanted; a fleeting mentality |
| The “valley of ashes” | Between West Egg and New York City; a long stretch of desolate land created by the dumping of industrial ashes |
| The Jazz Age/The Roarin’ Twenties | The period of time in which Gatsby was set; everyone was stupid and kinda sucked |
| Prohibition | The period of time when the consumption/sale of alcohol was illegal; led people to have underground Speakeasies or questionable tactics |
| The “beautiful shirts” scene | Daisy is very upset because she realizes that if she waited she could have Gatsby and wealth |
| The “can’t repeat the past” scene | Gatsby’s most famous line in which he says course you can change the past; shows his nostalgia for the past and his hope to get back what he lost |
| Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald | F. Scott’s Father |
| Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald | F. Scott’s Wife |
| Ginevra King | Inspiration of Daisy; “Rich girls don’t marry poor boys” |
The Great Gatsby
April 8, 2020