Who's Who in The Great Gatsby: a Character Guide to West Egg, East Egg and the Valley of Ashes

There are only eight characters in The Great Gatsby worth keeping straight, and the book sorts every one of them by the same rule. Not how much money they have. Where the money came from, and how long ago. Get that rule in place and the cast arranges itself in about a minute.

• ✅East Egg is inherited money. Tom and Daisy Buchanan, and Jordan Baker among them.
• ✅West Egg is new money.Gatsby’s mansion, and Nick’s rented house next to it.
• ✅The valley of ashes is no money. George and Myrtle Wilson, at a garage on the road to town.
• ✅Everyone in the book crosses at least one of those lines. That is the plot.

If you would rather meet them, the playable The Great Gatsby opens at the Buchanans’ dinner table, which is where the novel introduces three of them at once.

💰 The short answer: sorted by where the money came from

Nick lays out the geography in chapter one, and the description is pointed. Two egg-shaped peninsulas stick out into Long Island Sound, identical in shape and size and completely unalike in every other respect. He lives on West Egg, which he calls, after a small hesitation, “the less fashionable of the two”. Across the water on East Egg the houses belong to families whose money is old enough that nobody asks where it came from.

Everything the book does with class runs off that split. Gatsby’s house has a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden, which is more house than anything on East Egg, and it buys him nothing at all in the eyes of the people he wants to impress. Between the two Eggs and Manhattan lies the valley of ashes, where the ash from the city is dumped and where the people who serve both worlds live.

The playable version drops you into the same dinner in chapter one: play along with Tom's monologue, or ask the question everyone at the table is avoiding. Role-play The Great Gatsby →

🏛️ East Egg: the people who inherited it

Tom Buchanan(chapter one). Enormously wealthy from birth, from Chicago, and at New Haven “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football”. He arrives on Long Island having shipped a string of polo ponies down from Lake Forest, which tells you the register. He is racist in the opening chapter, breaks Myrtle Wilson’s nose with the flat of his hand in chapter two, and in chapter nine tells Nick, without apparent discomfort, “I told him the truth” about the man who came to his door with a gun.

Daisy Buchanan(chapter one). Born Daisy Fay in Louisville, the most popular girl in town at eighteen, married to Tom, mother of a daughter called Pammy who appears once, in chapter seven. She is given the novel’s sharpest line about her own position and its most consequential silence. Whether that adds up to a villain is the argument in the essay on Daisy.

Jordan Baker(chapter one). A professional golfer, Daisy’s friend since Louisville, and the woman Nick spends the summer seeing; he says in chapter three that he was not actually in love but felt “a sort of tender curiosity”. Nick calls her “incurably dishonest” in chapter three, immediately after remembering the story he had been trying to place: at her first big golf tournament there was a suggestion she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semifinal. She is also the one who supplies the book’s moral vocabulary, six chapters before Nick uses it.

🏠 West Egg: the people who made it recently

Jay Gatsby(properly introduced in chapter three, talked about from chapter one). The host of the parties, the owner of the mansion, and for two chapters a rumour rather than a person. Everything about the self he presents was built deliberately, starting at seventeen when he rowed out to a stranger’s yacht on Lake Superior. The manner of speech that gives the construction away is the subject of the essay on his favourite phrase.

Nick Carraway(chapter one). The narrator. From the Middle West, graduated from New Haven in 1915, came East in 1922 to learn the bond business, and rents the small house beside Gatsby’s. He is related to Daisy and was at college with Tom, which is the only reason the plot can happen. How much of what he tells you to trust is the question in the essay on Nick.

Meyer Wolfshiem(chapter four; many later editions and film credits spell it Wolfsheim). Gatsby’s business partner, a gambler, and the man Gatsby says “fixed the World’s Series back in 1919”. He wears cufflinks made of what he cheerfully calls the “finest specimens of human molars”.

The party guests (chapter three onward) are a running joke rather than characters, with two exceptions worth knowing. The owl-eyed man in the Gothic library, who is astonished to find that the books are real, and Klipspringer, a man who stays at the house so often that he becomes known simply as the boarder. Neither is a friend.

🏭 The valley of ashes: the people with none

George Wilson(chapter two). Keeps a garage on the road between West Egg and Manhattan, in the grey stretch Fitzgerald introduces as “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat”. He is described as spiritless and anaemic, and he is the only person in the novel who takes a moral position and acts on it, with catastrophic results.

Myrtle Wilson(chapter two). George’s wife and Tom’s mistress. She is the character who tries hardest to cross the line the book draws, renting a flat in the city and behaving in it like someone with a different life, and she is the first person the book kills for it.

Doctor T. J. Eckleburg is not a person. He is a faded billboard for an oculist above the ash heaps, a pair of enormous blue eyes behind yellow spectacles, and Fitzgerald leaves him watching for the whole novel without comment. It is the most famous object in the book after the light on the dock, which the essay on the green light deals with.

Henry C. Gatz arrives in chapter nine, by telegram and then in person, and is the only relative anyone in this book produces.

🧨 Why Tom’s problem with Gatsby is not the bootlegging

Readers notice a pattern on a second pass that is easy to miss on a first. Tom’s objection to Gatsby is dressed as moral outrage about criminality, and it behaves like contempt for a man from the wrong side of the bay. He starts investigating Gatsby before he knows anything about drugstores. The bootlegging is the ammunition he goes looking for once he has already decided.

The last chapter supplies the proof. Tom admits to Nick that he sent George Wilson to Gatsby’s house, says “I told him the truth” about whose car it was, shakes hands, and walks into a jewellery shop to buy a pearl necklace. Nothing in the novel measures the distance between the two Eggs more exactly than that.

Fitzgerald gives the whole system away in the geography before he gives it away in dialogue. Two peninsulas of the same shape and size, one fashionable and one not, and nothing separating them but which generation the money arrived in. What that arrangement does to a person who tries to move between them is the subject of the essay on the American Dream.

“I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.”

Every name, chapter number and quotation above was checked against the free 1925 text at Project Gutenberg, which is the edition this guide follows for spellings.