The Great Gatsby Ending Explained: Who Killed Gatsby and What Happens After

Spoilers for the whole of The Great Gatsby, including who fires the shot and who sent him.

The shooting takes two paragraphs at the end of Chapter VIII. The rest of the book is about the people who walk away from it, and the scene where Nick watches that happen is a doorway in the playable Great Gatsby, set at the nearly empty funeral, when somebody has to decide who gets told what.

🏊 Who kills Gatsby at the end?

George Wilson, the garage owner whose wife was killed by Gatsby’s yellow car the night before. Nobody sees the shooting. Gatsby goes down to the pool at two in the afternoon with a pneumatic mattress, having told his chauffeur that the open car is not to be taken out, and the chauffeur later says he heard the shots and thought little of them.

Nick arrives from the station, and four of them hurry down to the water. The mattress with its burden is drifting slowly toward the drain, turning in the current and tracing a thin red circle. Only after they start carrying Gatsby toward the house does the gardener see Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, which is how the book tells you the second shot was his own.

The bitter part is that Wilson has the wrong man. Back in Chapter VII, Gatsby tells Nick outright that Daisy was at the wheel when Myrtle ran into the road, and that he intends to say he was driving. He keeps that promise to the end, and it is the reason he is the one in the pool.

🗝️ What Tom admits on Fifth Avenue

The last piece arrives late in October, when Nick sees Tom walking ahead of him on Fifth Avenue and refuses to shake his hand. Nick asks what Tom said to Wilson that afternoon, and Tom’s silence tells him he has guessed right about the hours Wilson went missing.

“I told him the truth. He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren’t in he tried to force his way upstairs.”

Tom says Wilson was crazy enough to kill him and had a hand on a revolver the whole time, so he told him who owned the car. In Tom’s version that was simple honesty, because he believes Gatsby was driving. Nick knows otherwise and says nothing, recording only the one unutterable fact that what Tom believes is not true. Tom never learns that his own wife killed his mistress, and he points a grieving, armed man at the person who covered for her.

📞 Who is left to bury him

Nick calls Daisy half an hour after they find Gatsby, and learns that she and Tom went away early that afternoon and took baggage with them. A telegram signed Henry C. Gatz arrives on the third day from Gatsby’s father. Klipspringer, who lived in the house for months, phones only to ask about a pair of tennis shoes he left behind, and Meyer Wolfshiem will not come.

At the funeral the minister waits half an hour at Nick’s request, and then the line arrives that sums up the guest list: “Nobody came.” At the cemetery the only party guest is Owl Eyes, the man Nick once found in the library. The rest are Gatsby’s father, the minister, Nick, a few servants and the postman from West Egg. The party guests and what their absence means belong to the essay on Gatsby’s parties, and this page leaves that argument there.

💎 Careless people, and a pearl necklace

The Fifth Avenue scene ends with Nick’s judgement of the Buchanans, delivered in his head while Tom is still talking about himself. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy, who smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Then Nick shakes Tom’s hand anyway, and Tom goes into a jewellery store to buy a pearl necklace, or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons. Fitzgerald ends the confrontation on a shopping errand, and the Project Gutenberg text of the 1925 novel gives Tom no further scene. In the same conversation he tells Nick that he cried like a baby over a box of dog biscuits in Myrtle’s flat, which is the full extent of his mourning.

🚂 Why Nick goes back West

After Gatsby’s death the East is haunted for Nick, distorted beyond his power of correction, and in the autumn he decides to come back home. He ends one awkward relationship in person, says goodbye to the empty house, and leaves. If you want the earlier chapters in order before rereading this one, the reference entry on the novel has a chapter-by-chapter plot.

What he says on his last night at the house, looking across the water, is the passage most readers mean when they ask about the ending, and the green light essay reads that closing image line by line.

• ✅The shooter is Wilson. He kills Gatsby in the pool and then turns the gun on himself in the grass nearby.
• ✅The driver was Daisy. Gatsby told Nick so in Chapter VII and planned to take the blame, which he does.
• ✅The informer was Tom. He gave Wilson the owner of the car and calls it telling the truth.