Who’s who in The Great Gatsby

East Egg — old money

• Tom BuchananDaisy’s husband; polo ponies; New Haven The egg made flesh: a national football name at twenty-one and restless ever since, drifting “wherever people played polo and were rich together.” He opens the novel lecturing the dinner table on The Rise of the Coloured Empires — “Civilization’s going to pieces” (Ch. I) — keeps Myrtle in a city flat and breaks her nose with an open hand (Ch. II), and coins the four words that are the whole class war of the book: “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (Ch. VII). It is Tom who tells Wilson whose car it was. He never doubts himself for a sentence.
• Daisy Buchanannée Fay; Nick’s cousin; the green light The golden girl of Louisville, the prize Gatsby bought a mansion to be near, and the novel’s most quoted mother: “I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (Ch. I). Gatsby finally names what everyone hears in her: “Her voice is full of money” (Ch. VII). She is driving the car that kills Myrtle, lets Gatsby take the blame, and does not send so much as a flower to the funeral.
• Jordan Bakergolf champion; Daisy’s friend; Nick’s girl, for a summer Cool, balanced — she carries herself “like a young cadet” — and famous enough that Nick has seen her face in sporting magazines. Also a cheat: the story of the moved ball in a semi-final trails her, and Nick decides she is “incurably dishonest” in the same chapter she delivers her driving philosophy: “It takes two to make an accident” (Ch. III). She is the book’s second narrator — the whole Louisville backstory of Gatsby and Daisy arrives through her over tea (Ch. IV).
• Pammy BuchananTom and Daisy’s daughter Appears exactly once: brought out by her nurse in Chapter VII, greeted as “the bles-sed pre-cious,” shown to the guests, and led away. Gatsby looks at her “with surprise” — the living proof that the five years he means to erase actually happened. Her whole future was assigned in Chapter I, an hour after her birth, in her mother’s wish for a beautiful little fool.
• Mr. Sloanea riding-party neighbour Turns up on horseback at Gatsby’s door with Tom and a lady in Chapter VI, accepts nothing, offers a dinner invitation that is pure etiquette — and is baffled, then contemptuous, when Gatsby takes it at face value. Eight pages of East Egg condescension in one small, perfectly mannered package.

West Egg — new money

• Jay Gatsbyborn James Gatz; “old sport,” forty-one times The title, the mansion, the parties, the mystery — and underneath all of it, a seventeen-year-old from North Dakota who invented a better self on the deck of a millionaire’s yacht and “to this conception he was faithful to the end” (Ch. VI). Five years after losing Daisy to Tom’s money, he has assembled a fortune of dubious origin and a palace across the bay from her dock, on the theory that time is negotiable: “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” (Ch. VI). He takes the blame for Myrtle’s death without hesitation and is shot in his own pool for it (Ch. VIII).
• Nick Carrawaythe narrator; Daisy’s cousin; the cottage next door A Midwesterner in the bond business, renting the eighty-dollar eyesore between the mansions, old-family enough to dine on either shore — the one character with a foot on each egg. He opens the book reserving judgment and closes it having judged everyone: “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (Ch. III); “They’re a rotten crowd… You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together” (Ch. VIII) — the only compliment he ever pays Gatsby, shouted across a lawn. He turns thirty in the middle of the book’s worst afternoon, and two years later he writes it all down.
• Owl Eyesnever named; enormous spectacles Found in the library at the first party, drunk for a week and stunned by the books: “Absolutely real — have pages and everything… This fella’s a regular Belasco” (Ch. III) — real books, uncut pages, the entire Gatsby problem on one shelf. An hour later he climbs out of a car that has shed its wheel in a ditch, explaining with dignity that he wasn’t driving. Of the hundreds who drank the champagne, he is the only guest at the funeral, and he speaks the book’s bluntest eulogy: “The poor son-of-a-bitch” (Ch. IX).
• Ewing Klipspringer“the boarder” At the parties so often “that he became known as ‘the boarder’ — I doubt if he had any other home” (Ch. IV). Surfaces from a bedroom in Chapter V, embarrassed, to hammer out “The Love Nest” on the piano while Gatsby and Daisy fall back in love behind him. After the murder he telephones — not about the funeral, which he is skipping for a picnic in Greenwich, but about a pair of tennis shoes he left behind (Ch. IX). Nick hangs up on him. A klipspringer, fittingly, is a small African antelope that bounces from rock to rock.

The valley of ashes — between

• Myrtle WilsonTom’s mistress; the flat on 158th Street The one person in the grey country with “an immediately perceptible vitality,” determined to live at the volume of the city flat Tom keeps for her — the dog, the gossip magazines, the list of all the things she’s got to get (Ch. II). The same chapter ends with Tom breaking her nose for saying Daisy’s name three times. She dies in Chapter VII running toward the yellow car she believes is his, and the description of her body is the most brutal sentence Fitzgerald ever published.
• George Wilsonher husband; the garage under the eyes “A blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome,” running a failing garage under the billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. He is the only person in the novel destroyed by love with nothing else mixed in. After the accident he confuses the billboard with heaven — “God sees everything,” he repeats, and Michaelis has to tell him, “That’s an advertisement” (Ch. VIII) — then walks to West Egg with a revolver, kills Gatsby in his pool, and kills himself.
• MichaelisMavro Michaelis; the coffee joint next door The young Greek who runs the all-night restaurant beside Wilson’s garage, principal witness at the inquest, and the quiet hero of the book’s darkest hours: he sits with Wilson through the entire night after Myrtle’s death, making coffee, hiding the whisky, trying to reason a shattered man back to earth (Ch. VIII). For one long stretch Nick’s narration hands the novel to him entirely — the accident and its aftermath are his testimony, retold.

New York — the city

• Meyer WolfshiemWolfsheim, in later editions; “a denizen of Broadway” Gatsby’s business associate, met over lunch in a Forty-second Street cellar: small, flat-nosed, sentimental, wearing cufflinks he identifies as the “finest specimens of human molars” (Ch. IV) — and, per Gatsby, “the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.” Fitzgerald drew him from Arnold Rothstein, the real gambler behind the Black Sox scandal. He claims he “raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter” (Ch. IX) — the closest the novel comes to explaining where the money is from — then declines the funeral with an epitaph better than he knows: “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead” (Ch. IX).
• CatherineMyrtle’s sister “A slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair” (Ch. II), full of confident misinformation at the flat party — she is the one who tells Nick the Buchanan marriage is held together by a fictional Catholicism. At the inquest she “might have said anything” and says nothing: she swears her sister never knew Gatsby, and the whole scandal is buried with the case (Ch. IX).
• The McKeesthe flat below, Ch. II Chester McKee, “a pale, feminine man” and photographer — “I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island” — and his shrill wife, who has been photographed by her husband a hundred and twenty-seven times. Guests at Myrtle’s party, present for the broken nose, gone from the book by morning.

The past — how James Gatz became Jay Gatsby

• Dan Codythe yacht Tuolomee The millionaire — Nevada silver, Montana copper, “the pioneer debauchee” — whose yacht anchored off Lake Superior the afternoon seventeen-year-old James Gatz rowed out to warn him about the weather and rowed back as Jay Gatsby (Ch. VI). Five years of employment aboard taught Gatsby manners, yachting clothes, and a lifelong distrust of drink. Cody exists in the book as a photograph on Gatsby’s wall and never speaks a line — which is why he keeps the page’s own ink.
• Ella Kayethe newspaper woman The one who got the money. She “played Madame de Maintenon” to Cody’s weakness, came aboard the yacht in Boston, and a week later Cody “inhospitably died” (Ch. VI). The twenty-five-thousand-dollar legacy Cody left Gatsby went to her instead, by a legal device Gatsby never understood — so the second fortune, the one you can see from Daisy’s dock, had to be made another way.
• Henry C. GatzGatsby’s father, from Minnesota A solemn old man in a cheap ulster who arrives for the funeral “out of a town in Minnesota” carrying two proofs of his son (Ch. IX): a photograph of the mansion, cracked from handling, and a ragged copy of Hopalong Cassidy with a boyhood self-improvement schedule pencilled inside the back cover — rise 6.00 a.m., dumbbell exercise, study needed inventions. “Jimmy was bound to get ahead.” The saddest color assignment in the app: purple, for a man who speaks only at his son’s burial.

Honest footnote: the app keys each speaker to a hue and maps it to a twelve-color, contrast-checked palette — and Gatsby’s cast fills all twelve slots, down to Owl Eyes and the boarder. The names above with a dark chip — Pammy, the Sloanes, Catherine, the McKees, Dan Cody, Ella Kaye — speak too rarely (or never) to claim one; their few lines print in the page’s own ink.