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One reason that The Great Gatsby has now become a byword for the East Coast of the Roaring 20s—the decadently extravagant post-WWI era—is that Fitzgerald was amazing at creating memorable settings. Whether it's the sprawling luxury of Gatsby's mansion, the drunken chaos of Myrtle's apartment, or the suffocating airlessness of a suite at the Plaza Hotel, The Great Gatsby features settings that perfectly encapsulate character, mood, atmosphere, and emotions.

In this article, I'll go through all of the Great Gatsby settings, explain what role settings play in a novel, show how these settings compare with one another, and explore what symbolic meaning they have.

Article Roadmap

1. Why Is Setting Important
2. All the Settings in The Great Gatsby
3. Great Gatsby Time Period Setting
   • 1922
   • Summertime
4. Comparing and Contrasting Paired Great Gatsby Locations
   • Midwest versus East Coast
   • Manhattan versus Long Island
   • East Egg versus West Egg
   • Gatsby's mansion versus Daisy and Tom's mansion
5. The Valley of Ashes: Setting and Symbol
6. How to Write About Setting 

Why Is Setting Important?

The literary term "setting" means the time and place of a novel's events. If the characters are the "who," then the setting is the "where" and "when." This "where and when" can be very general - for example, "20th century Earth." Alternately, the setting can be each of the many different places where any of the novel’s actions occur, no matter how small. For instance, you could a imagine a domestic drama where different rooms in the same house work as different settings.

Usually, novels feature several different settings, and authors use descriptive language to explain what these times and places look, smell, sound, and maybe even feel like. Using these descriptions, we can learn a lot!

Settings help readers fully understand characters. Character backgrounds, motivations, and the pressures they feel from their environment and surrounding society, are often coded into the places where they are. For example, a 20-year-old woman in a novel set in Victorian England would be under enormous pressure to get married and have kids (this desperation is the plot of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth). Meanwhile, the same woman in a novel set in today’s NYC is going to be more worried about getting a job (the main drama in The Devil Wears Prada).

Settings develop or affect plot. Actions that are commonplace in one setting would be impossible in another. Often this has to do with what is and isn't considered acceptable behavior. Other times, it has to do with the technology, transportation, or means of communication that are available in a particular time. Many bad decisions in G. R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire happen because it takes weeks or months to get a piece of information from one castle to another - the quasi-medieval setting dictates this part of the plot.

Settings contribute to mood, tone, and atmosphere. Many novels use setting as a way of developing a particular mood. For instance, the magical yet desolate and creepy setting of the moors in Wuthering Heights creates the prevailing air of menace, imprisonment, and terror that infects that novel. Contrast this with the cozy setting of Little Women, where the March house represents the loving, close-knit, family atmosphere of the novel as a whole.

Settings are used for symbolic or thematic purposes. Sometimes a particular setting is linked to one of the novel's themes, functions as a symbol, or if used to make moral, ethical, or aesthetic judgments. For example, in The Great Gatsby, the Valley of Ashes – an industrial neighborhood in Queens – symbolizes the desperate circumstances of those who are victims of the capitalist system the novel describes.

There's a reason horror movies aren't typically set in sunny green meadows.

All the Settings In The Great Gatsby

Before analyzing the Great Gatsby settings, I'm going to briefly explain and describe all the different settings that the novel uses.

Time Setting

The Great Gatsby takes place during the summer of 1922. The 1920s are a period that is sometimes called the Roaring 20s or the Jazz Age.

Location Settings

The Great Gatsby takes place in the United States. Most of the characters come from the Midwest to the East Coast.

In the novel, the East Coast setting is divided into three distinct places: Manhattan, Long Island, and an industrial part of Queens that the novel calls either the Valley of Ashes or just the ashheaps.

In Manhattan, we see two main settings: Tom and Myrtle's apartment uptown in Harlem, and a suite in the very posh Plaza Hotel next to Central Park.

Gatsby's Long Island is broken down into two incredibly wealthy towns that face each other across a bay: West Egg, less fashionable and home to new money people, and East Egg, where older and more established families live.

We see two West Egg settings: Jay Gatsby's sprawling, extravagant mansion, and Nick Carraway's small rented house next door.

In East Egg lies Tom and Daisy Buchanan's red and white Georgian mansion.

In the novel's version of Queens, the main setting is George Wilson's garage and the road that runs next to it, connecting Long Island and Manhattan.

Oheka Castle, one of the real life mansions that are said to have inspired Fitzgerald.

Quick Note on Our Citations

Our citation format in this guide is (chapter.paragraph). We're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book. To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of chapter; 50-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text.

Great Gatsby Time Period Setting

What makes the Roaring 20’s different from other periods in history, and why does all the action take place in the summer time?

1922

The novel takes place during a period of enormous change and transition for the U.S. 

1919 brought the end of World War I, a war marked by its massive death toll and the horrors of trench warfare which countered the image of soldiering as glorious and heroic. The young men who fought in the war were dubbed The Lost Generation: the devastated and aimless survivors and the needlessly slaughtered dead.

The post-war period in America was later dubbed the Roaring 20s because of the country's rapidly growing economy and the greater influence abroad that came as a result of American involvement in the war. Many of the things this time period is famous for connect with events in the novel.

• Prohibition went into effect in 1920, making almost all recreation alcohol illegal. This means that any time you see people drinking alcohol in the novel, they are breaking the law. Moreover, Gatsby’s enormous wealth comes from him being a bootlegger - someone who illegally sells alcohol

• Women got the right to vote in 1919, and the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1923. In The Great Gatsby, the power and agency of women come up often. The three women in the novel make choices about their independence; Daisy and Myrtle find it hard to escape dysfunctional marriages, though they try through affairs; Jordan is able to lead a more independent life.

• The production and ownership of cars skyrocketed after Ford popularized the efficient mass production of cars by assembly line. In the 1920, 1 out of 4 Americans owned a car. In the novel, cars are associated with danger and recklessness, as people are constantly either talking about car accidents or getting into them. And of course, the climax of the novel is when Daisy runs over and kills Myrtle.

Summer

The Great Gatsby pointedly takes place during the summer, as opposed to any other season. I say pointedly because the novel goes out of its way to assign meaning to summertime and to contrast it with the rest of the year - and often even with itself.

For example, summer is somehow both healthfully airy and horribly suffocating. Nick initially relishes the Long Island summer, shirking his work because there is "so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air" (1.12). 

But in the tense confrontation in the Plaza Hotel, where Tom, Gatsby, and Daisy have a life-changing fight, the oppressive and unbearable summer heat means the room has basically no breathable air at all:

Similarly, it's up for debate whether the summer brings with it life - the way we typically associate new foliage with a sense of rebirth - or not. On the one hand, Nick starts out with a traditional view of the summertime:

But soon, Jordan compares summer unfavorably to the potentially positive change that fall brings when she says. 

This desire to have life start over again is crucial, since this novel is so interested in how the wish for forward momentum fights against the way the past anchors us and pulls us back. Despite his initial positive feelings about the summer on the East Coast, Nick eventually reverts to his roots in the Midwest. He contrasts the disappointing summer he spends on Long Island with the season he associates with Midwestern wholesomeness and goodness - winter:

I don't know about you, but I'll take this version of summer any day.

Comparing and Contrasting Paired Great Gatsby Locations

Now let's tackle the Great Gatsby settings that function as foils to one another. We can analyze them by comparing and contrasting them to each other. 

Midwest vs. East Coast

Considering Nick eventually decides that what he has written is really the story of Midwesterners failing to make it on the East Coast, these might be the two most significant settings in the novel.

Still, before we dive in, it's important to remember that this Midwest is Nick's version of the Midwest, which is often undercut (for instance, a lot of Gatsby's criminal business comes as phone calls from big Midwestern cities like Detroit).

Nick describes the Midwest as the center of all things moral and wholesome. It's a place where everyone is friendly, happy, innocent, and so much "in it together," that when he is describing his memories of the Midwest, Nick doesn't use the pronoun "I," but instead starts writing in the first floors person plural "we":

In contrast, the East Coast is a place where everyone is so out for themselves, that after Gatsby dies none of the people whom he spent an entire summer entertaining can even be bothered enough to come to his funeral.

In the beginning, this Midwestern quality of goodness strikes Nick as boring, which is why he decides to go East to New York:

But after his experiences during the summer, Nick comes to see the East as a kind of nightmare of debauchery, violence, and a disregard for human life:

Manhattan vs. Long Island

The action in The Great Gatsby is about evenly split between Manhattan and Long Island. 

Overall, Manhattan is the place where characters go to show off their disregard for society’s rules and lawful behavior. It's the easiest place to accommodate sexual indiscretions and shady business dealings:

• In Chapter 2, Tom takes Nick there to meet his mistress, Myrtle, and go to a party at their apartment, where Tom has sex with her while Nick waits, and where Tom ends the evening by punching Myrtle in the face. 

• Gatsby takes Nick to Manhattan in Chapter 4 to have lunch with Meyer Wolfshiem, the gangster who fixed the World Series and who is Gatsby’s business partner.

• Finally, Gatsby, Nick, Daisy, Jordan, and Tom to go Manhattan in the explosive Chapter 7 showdown where Daisy chooses Tom over Gatsby.

Partly this is because Manhattan is portrayed as a melting pot where a diversity of social classes, races, and backgrounds is par for the course, and where unusual people don't really stand out. For example, check out this passage where Nick and Gatsby are driving into the city:

There are wealthy African-Americans, European immigrants, the living and the dead, all mixed together without a problem. The city is awash in possibility, the "wild promise" that anything could happen there - "even Gatsby." 

Also, misdeeds are easy to get away with in Manhattan because its size affords everyone enormous anonymity, which Nick loves:

On the other hand, Long Island is a much smaller, more insular community. Instead of shrugging off anonymous misbehavior, the people on Long Island care deeply about who their neighbors are and what they are doing. It's harder to conduct affairs, shady business, or whatever else there without incurring the moral opprobrium of everyone else. 

While Gatsby is unremarkable in Manhattan, in West Egg he becomes the focal point of unending rumors. People say he is related to Kaiser Willhelm (the ruler of Germany during WWI, and thus America's main enemy), that he is a German spy, and any number of other things:

Similarly, Tom's affair with Myrtle benefits from its city setting, as Tom feels free to cheat on his wife in public: "he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew" (2.4). Meanwhile, when Daisy and Gatsby start their affair, Gatsby has to fire his entire household staff because he is worried that his servants will tell everyone what they've seen:

You can see how rumor immediately spreads and is uncontainable in the close circles of Long Island. Even despite all of Gatsby's precautions, Nick has already "heard" from someone else that Gatsby has fired all his servants.

This minute observation of one's neighbors really differentiates the towns in Long Island from the big city of Manhattan.

The rumor mill even brings a reporter out to interview Gatsby in Chapter 6.

West Egg vs. East Egg

While very rich people live in both East Egg and West Egg, the difference is the kind of rich people live in each town. 

East Egg is for the old money crowd - people whose wealth is inherited, and who have been the upper crust of society for generations. In contrast, West Egg is for the nouveau riche - self-made people who have become rich recently and who were originally born into working or middle-class families.

This means that in general everyone from East Egg looks down on everyone from West Egg in order to demonstrate their superiority. (Nick is one of the exceptions: he lives in West Egg despite having the family background necessary to fit in in East Egg). At one of Gatsby’s parties, Nick hangs out with an East Egg group who don’t socialize with anyone else and who are clearly there to mock and be appalled by the other party guests:

This also means that since they can’t distinguish themselves through their wealth, East Egg residents rely on their better understanding of the nuances and minutiae of manners and behavior to signal that they are so very far above their West Egg neighbors. We get the sense that every East Egg person is forever sending knowing looks at every other East Egg person every time they encounter someone from West Egg. For example, check out Gatsby’s encounter with Tom’s horseback riding friend Sloane and his woman friend, when Gatsby repeatedly puts his foot in his mouth:

Gatsby, the quintessential West Egg-er, can’t tell that the woman doesn’t want him to come to her party. He is even less able to see that Sloane really doesn’t want him to come. And he doesn’t seem to sense how rude they are being to him - something which Tom and Nick pick up on immediately.

This social cluelessness and lack of social adroitness translate into the style with which Gatsby lives his life. He spends enormous sums of money, but with every purchase, he is always showing that he is new to the moneyed scene. Let’s see how this plays out in his house.

Gatsby’s Mansion vs. Daisy and Tom’s Mansion

The differences between old money and new money are reflected primarily by differences in style, aesthetics, and taste.

Gatsby typifies the ostentatious, over-the-top conspicuous consumption of those whose wealth is new and so must be always on display:

His house is a reproduction of French chateau. This is ridiculous both because this French design is out of place in America, and also because it is a visibly brand new building trying to replicate something that would be centuries old. It’s completely ludicrous, and it is telling that the only person who has the desired response to this mansion is Gatsby’s father: 

Gatsby’s father has the same taste as Gatsby - the appreciation of a poor person for the trappings of wealth.

Meanwhile, Daisy and Tom live in a house that is also extravagant, but one that has its luxury somewhat concealed:

The house is much more fit for its location - Georgian Colonial is an architectural style that is appropriate to America (as its name suggests, it came from England during the colonial period).

The description also confirms the permanence of the Buchanans' mansion. Gatsby’s house is fighting with its surroundings (it’s off both in time period, and it seems to be having a problem with the “raw” ivy). In contrast, Daisy and Tom’s house is so much a part of the environment that the grass “seemed to grow a little way into the house,” blurring outside and inside just like the open windows that let the breeze blow through.

It may not be too much to read some foreshadowing into these contrasting descriptions: Gatsby’s house is too new and not rooted enough. Meanwhile, the place where Daisy and Tom live is deeply embedded and seems unbreakable.

No one's pulling this thing out of the ground anytime soon.

The Valley of Ashes: Setting and Symbol

The Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby functions both as a literal place where the climactic event of the novel happens, and is also a powerful symbol – in other words, a concrete object that stands for an abstract idea connected to the novel's themes.

The Valley of Ashes is the name that Nick gives to an industrial neighborhood in Queens that the rich have to drive through on their way from the Eggs to Manhattan. This is where George Wilson has his gas station, and where Myrtle Wilson is run over and killed by Daisy. Suitably, it is a horribly bleak and drab place:

This is the place where those who cannot make it in the cutthroat world of East Coast capitalism end up. It is also the place propping up much of that wealth through the production coming from the factories that are polluting the spot.

But the description that transforms the ash that covers everything from simply being dust to a scary substance capable of creating otherworldly plans and people signals that this Valley of Ashes has rich symbolic meaning. For a detailed analysis of how this symbol functions within the great Gatsby, check out our articles on how to approach symbols in general and on the Valley of Ashes as a symbol in particular.

How to Write About The Great Gatsby Setting

So how do you use setting to create a compelling essay?

Pick a Topic

There are several ways to go about finding your topic when tackling this kind of assignment. Here are some possibilities:

Close reading. You can focus on settings themselves, digging really deeply into the description of one, two, or more places or times in the novel to explore how word choice, similes, metaphors, and any other literary devices help the reader visualize location. For example, you could trace the way the word "ash" appears in the novel, at first defining The Valley of Ashes itself is a kind of fantastical alternate reality, and then spreading out toward the places of the privileged. You could focus on a literary device called metonymy, using a part to stand in for the whole, and explore why the novel chooses to focus on Dustin Ash as the representative aspect of this neighborhood.

Connection to character. Often, setting is a way to define character. If you write about this, your essay will tease out the common qualities of a character and of the place most closely associated with that character. These will either be synergistic, with one amplifying the other, or else they will play as a contrast, undercutting the character. In our case, for instance, Gatsby's mansion speaks volumes about how he sees himself and his money, and also about the vast gulf that separates him from the upper elite that he really wants to be part of. Conversely, Nick's pokey little house seems humble and unassuming, much like Nick wants to project himself to be. But in reality, by being located next to obscenely luxurious mansions, the house is only falsely modest, and shows off some of Nick's poorly disguised snobbery. (Read more about all the novel's characters in our overview article.)

Connection to theme. Similarly, setting can help clarify a novel's theme by providing a concrete example of an abstract idea. In the great Gatsby, you could focus on the way one or more of the settings play into the failure of the American Dream, one of this novel's most salient themes. One way to do this would be to focus on the Valley of Ashes, the place where dreams come to die, both literally and figuratively. If the idea of the American dream is that through hard work anyone can become successful, then George Wilson's tragic fate, as exemplified through his garage and circumstances, serves to completely debunk this myth.

Create an Argument

It’s not enough to just describe one of the novel's settings and explain its possible connections to either character or theme - or to compare and contrast it to another setting. Instead, you have to make sure that you’re making some kind of point about why/how the setting functions in the novel as a whole.

How do you know if you’re making an argument and not just saying the obvious? If you can imagine someone arguing the opposite of what you’re saying, then you’ve got an argument on your hands.

Once you've figured out what you want to argue, start small by analyzing chunks of the text where the symbol pops up, and then broadening your points out to the rest of the book. This way, your argument will be strengthened by textual evidence.

What’s Next?

Learn how to write about the themes that settings are usually linked to.

Get help on other assignments by reading our guide on analyzing or comparing and contrasting characters.

Brush up on the context of these settings in our summary of The Great Gatsby.