Character Guide
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A story of decadence and excess, Gatsby explores the American Dream through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway in the summer of 1922.
Primary Characters
Each includes free "Up to This Point" arc summaries through every chapter they appear in.
Jordan Baker
Jordan Baker is a celebrated amateur golfer and a fixture in the wealthy Long Island social scene, particularly among the East Egg set where she maintains close friendship with Daisy Buchanan. Her professional golfing career and independent means make her unusually autonomous for a young woman of her time, and she moves through her world with the ease of someone who has never had to question her place in it. Witty and observant, Jordan presents herself as honest and direct, though she often reveals a capacity for carelessness with other people's feelings and circumstances. She becomes romantically involved with Nick Carraway, drawn to his apparent sincerity, but their relationship remains marked by mutual misunderstanding and the fundamental superficiality of their social sphere. Jordan's golf, her beauty, and her social position are the pillars of her identity, and she guards her autonomy fiercely while remaining dependent on the moneyed world that sustains her lifestyle. She is both a product of her era's new freedoms for women and a captive of its moral indifference.
Myrtle Wilson
Myrtle is a woman caught between her mundane marriage to George Wilson, a struggling garage operator, and her desire for the wealth and sophistication she glimpses in Tom Buchanan's world. She is vivacious and ambitious, with a flair for social drama and an eye for material comfort—qualities that make her both sympathetic and tragically self-deluding. Her apartment on 158th Street becomes a hub for her affair with Tom and occasional social gatherings with other wealthy acquaintances who treat her with a mixture of interest and disdain. Myrtle's vitality and vocal expressiveness mask a deeper vulnerability; she invests heavily in the fantasy that Tom will leave his wife, Daisy, creating an emotional vulnerability that distances her from her husband even as economic necessity keeps her tied to his garage business. Her hopes are pinned on a precarious social arrangement that can crumble without warning.
More Characters
View All CharactersDaisy Buchanan
George Wilson
George Wilson runs a humble garage business in the bleak industrial landscape of the valley of ashes, a far cry from the glittering world of wealth that lies just beyond. He is a passive, defeated man whose economic struggles and personal disappointments have left him spiritually hollow; his marriage appears joyless, and he seems to accept his modest lot without protest or ambition. His few interactions with the novel's central figures reveal a man of simple decency but little presence or force of personality—someone whom the wealthy world passes by without notice. Yet his modest life and the lives of those around him become unexpectedly intertwined with the grand passions and reckless actions of the novel's more glamorous characters, exposing the fragility beneath the surface of seemingly separate worlds.
Jay Gatsby
Fan Theories(0 published)
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