About the book
Narrated by Nick Carraway, this novel explores the lives of the wealthy elite on Long Island during the summer of 1922. After moving next door to the mysterious and extravagant Jay Gatsby, Nick becomes entangled in the complex social circles of his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom, revealing the tensions and restlessness hidden behind their opulent lifestyles.
The opening
I
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice
that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember
that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way,
and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.
In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me
and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.
The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person,
and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician,
because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.
Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity
when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon;
for the intimate revelations of young men,
or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested,
and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.