Gatsby Character Analysis
Character Analysis Jordan Baker Jordan Baker is an attractive, impulsive, childhood friend of Daisy
Buchanan. She is the first person to bring up the subject of Gatsby to Nick Carraway. She also relates the
sad story of his relationship with Daisy and Daisy's doomed marriage to the philandering Tom Buchanan.
While intrigued by her good looks, Nick recalls that he saw her picture in photos of the sporting life at
Asheville, Hot Springs, and Palm Beach in connection with a “critical, unpleasant story.” The reader later
discovers this concerns a time she cheated in a major golf tournament. Her insincerity with Nick in their
love affair is another example of her detached personality. When she first appears in the novel, she is
lounging on a sofa with Daisy “as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of
all desire,” like two princesses in an unreal world. Both women use and dispose of people, as Gatsby and
Nick experience firsthand. In Fitzgerald's long line of sensual, modern flapper characters, Jordan is one of
the most well-known. There is an amoral aura about her, and her world revolves around herself and false
material values. Jordan is distinguished from Daisy m her hard, unsentimental view of romance.
Daisy Buchanan
Daisy Buchanan is one of the true “Golden Girls” of Fitzgerald's stories, the wealthy, hard-to-get
debutante. In this book, she is the love interest of Jay Gatsby, who builds his mansion for her, and views
her East Egg home from the point of its green light. She is the cousin of Nick Carraway, and was brought
up in Louisville society. She was the young love of Gatsby when he was a soldier. He does not see her after
he is called to battle overseas. During the interim, she meets Tom Buchanan and marries him. At first
happy in this marriage, she later discovers that Tom is having affairs. She withdraws into a dream world,
yet never loses interest in the illusion of her love with Gatsby. Daisy flirts with him and entertains his
obsessive interest until she commits murder and he takes the rap. Then, she hides behind the protection
of her husband, a cruel brute, who uses and abuses people. Moreover, Daisy's voice is the voice of money,
as Nick discovers. Her whole careless world revolves around this illusion: that money makes everything
beautiful, even if it is not. The danger is, like Gatsby, she carries the “well-forgotten dreams from age to
age.” Her spiritual lightness parallels her material wealth, and she hides behind Tom when Gatsby is in
danger. From the film The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, Paramount, 1974.
Tom Buchanan
Tom Buchanan is the villain of this novel and has Nazi-like theories of race. Nick knew him from Yale and
describes him as “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football” there. From an “enormously
wealthy” family, he brings a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest, Illinois, to the East. He and Daisy spend
Character Analysis 67 a year in France and “drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played
polo and were rich together,” before ending up in East Egg. After college, Tom changes and becomes, the
writer notes, a blond thirty-year-old with a “rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.” He tells Nick
that, based on a book Tom has read and obviously reveres, “The Rise of the Colored Empires,” civilization
is “going to pieces” and that the white race will be “submerged.” Nick observes that Tom and Daisy
belonged to a “secret society” that ruined, through their insensitivity and carelessness, other peoples'
lives. Tom is demeaning to George Wilson, his mistress's husband, who owns a garage in the wasteland
between New York and East Egg. He also mistreats Myrtle herself, whom he violently hits in front of her
sister and Nick when she mentions Daisy's name. The overall impression the reader has of this character
