Nick Carraway decides to go East

Nick Carraway's decision to go East in the spring of 1922 is the foundational action of The Great Gatsby, the choice that transforms him from a restless Midwesterner into the narrator of a tragedy he could not have foreseen. It is a decision born of post-war restlessness and a sense that the Middle West, once the warm centre of the world, had become "the ragged edge of the universe." After participating in the Great War and enjoying the counter-raid so thoroughly that he came back restless, Nick found himself unable to settle. He decided to go East and learn the bond business, a field in which everybody he knew was already engaged, and which he supposed could support one more single man. His family, prominent and well-to-do in their Middle Western city for three generations, discussed the plan as if choosing a prep school for him, finally offering a grave, hesitant "Why—ye—es." His father agreed to finance him for a year, and after various delays, Nick came East, permanently he thought, in the spring of 1922.

The Journey East and First Impressions

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but the warm season and his recent departure from a country of wide lawns and friendly trees led him to accept a suggestion from a young man at the office that they take a house together in a commuting town. That young man found a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and Nick went out to the country alone. He had a dog for a few days until it ran away, an old Dodge, and a Finnish woman who made his bed, cooked breakfast, and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning a man, more recently arrived than he, stopped him on the road and asked how to get to West Egg village. Nick told him, and as he walked on he was lonely no longer. He felt himself a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler, and the man had casually conferred on him the freedom of the neighborhood. With the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, Nick had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

The Choice of West Egg and Its Significance

It was a matter of chance that Nick rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. He lived at West Egg, the less fashionable of the two enormous eggs of land that jut out into Long Island Sound, a choice that placed him in a bizarre and not a little sinister contrast with the white palaces of East Egg across the courtesy bay. His own house was an eyesore, squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season, one of which was Gatsby's mansion. For eighty dollars a month, Nick had a view of the water, a partial view of his neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires. This accidental geography made him a neighbor to Jay Gatsby and a witness to the summer's unfolding drama.

The Deeper Motivation: Escape and Self-Definition

Nick's decision to go East was not merely a career move; it was an attempt to escape a tangle back home. He had been writing letters once a week and signing them "Love, Nick" to a girl back West, but he knew he had to get himself definitely out of that situation before he was free. The fact that gossip had published the banns of his engagement was one of the reasons he had come East. He could not stop going with an old friend on account of rumors, but he had no intention of being rumored into marriage. The East offered a fresh start, a place where he could become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man," and where he could pursue the high intention of reading many books and bringing back all such things into his life.

The Return West: A Reversal of the Decision

After Gatsby's death, the East became haunted for Nick, distorted beyond his eyes' power of correction. When the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line, he decided to come back home. The decision to go East had been a quest for adventure and self-discovery; the decision to return was an acknowledgment that the East's promise had curdled into a quality of distortion. Nick saw that the story of Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and himself, was a story of the West after all—they were all Westerners, and perhaps they possessed some deficiency in common which made them subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. Before leaving, he performed one last awkward, unpleasant thing: he saw Jordan Baker and broke off their relationship, telling her he was thirty and five years too old to lie to himself and call it honor. He also confronted Tom Buchanan on Fifth Avenue, learning that Tom had told George Wilson who owned the yellow car, a revelation that sealed Gatsby's fate. Nick's final act was to erase an obscene word scrawled on Gatsby's white steps and to wander down to the beach, where he brooded on Gatsby's dream and the green light, before returning to the Middle West, leaving the empty mansion and the careless people behind.