Nick Carraway decides to return to the Midwest

After the violent deaths of Jay Gatsby and George Wilson, and the subsequent hollow, poorly attended funeral, Nick Carraway makes the decisive choice to leave the East and return to his home in the Middle West. This decision is not a sudden impulse but the culmination of a summer-long process of disillusionment, a final, deliberate act of withdrawal from a world he has come to find morally repulsive and spiritually empty. It marks the end of his youthful adventure and his re-embrace of the more stable, if more provincial, values of his origins.

The Moral Reckoning with the East

The immediate catalyst for Nick's decision is the profound disgust he feels after Gatsby's death. The East, once a place of thrilling possibility, has become for him a "night scene by El Greco," a grotesque and distorted landscape haunted by the memory of Gatsby's failed dream. He sees the Buchanans, Tom and Daisy, as "careless people" who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." This realization, that their wealth and social position allow them to evade all consequences, is the core of his revulsion. His final confrontation with Tom Buchanan on Fifth Avenue confirms this judgment. When Nick asks Tom what he said to Wilson that afternoon, Tom admits he told Wilson that Gatsby owned the yellow car, effectively sending the deranged man to Gatsby's house. Tom justifies this by calling Gatsby a "tough one" who "ran over Myrtle like you'd run over a dog and never even stopped his car." Nick knows this is a lie—Daisy was driving—but he sees that Tom, in his own mind, is entirely justified. This encounter solidifies Nick's understanding that the Buchanans are beyond any moral appeal, and he wants no part of their world.

The Break with Jordan Baker and the Past

Before leaving, Nick performs one final, awkward task: he ends his relationship with Jordan Baker. He finds her dressed to play golf, and in a conversation that circles around what has happened between them, she tells him without comment that she is engaged to another man. Nick doubts this but pretends to be surprised. Jordan then accuses him of throwing her over on the telephone, saying it was a new experience for her. She reminds him of their earlier conversation about driving, where he said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver. "Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I?" she says, implying that Nick himself was the careless one. Nick responds, "I'm thirty," he said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor." This moment of self-awareness, of refusing to continue a relationship built on a foundation of mutual dishonesty and carelessness, is a crucial step in his moral reclamation. He leaves her, "Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry."

The Return to the Middle West

Nick's decision to go home is also a return to a sense of identity and place. He reflects on his Middle Western roots, remembering the thrilling return trains of his youth, the "real snow," and the feeling of being "unutterably aware of our identity with this country." He sees now that the entire story has been "a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life." The East, for all its excitement, has always had for him "a quality of distortion." Gatsby's death makes this distortion unbearable, and the decision to return home is an act of self-preservation, a way to re-enter a world where things are more solid and less morally ambiguous.

The Final Vigil and the Green Light

On his last night in West Egg, Nick goes to Gatsby's house one final time. He erases an obscene word scrawled on the white steps, a final, small act of decency in a place that has shown so little. Then he wanders down to the beach and sprawls out on the sand. As the moon rises, he thinks of the "old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world." This vision of a pristine, prelapsarian America connects directly to Gatsby's own wonder when he first saw the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. Nick realizes that Gatsby's dream, like the Dutch sailors' dream of a new world, was already behind him, lost in the vast obscurity of the past. The novel ends with Nick's famous meditation on the green light, the "orgastic future that year by year recedes before us," and the final, haunting image of humanity beating on, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." This is Nick's final, elegiac understanding of Gatsby's tragedy and his own, a recognition that the desire to repeat the past is a fundamental, and ultimately futile, human drive. His decision to return to the Midwest is his own attempt to stop beating against the current, to accept the past and move forward, however reluctantly, into a more honest future.