<P> In her book Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of' The Great Gatsby (2013), Sarah Churchwell speculates that parts of the ending of The Great Gatsby were based on the Hall - Mills Case . Based on her forensic search for clues, she asserts that the two victims in the Hall - Mills murder case inspired the characters who were murdered in The Great Gatsby . </P> <P> The main events of the novel take place in the summer of 1922 . Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and veteran of the Great War from the Midwest--who serves as the novel's narrator--takes a job in New York as a bond salesman . He rents a small house on Long Island, in the fictional village of West Egg, next door to the lavish mansion of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire who holds extravagant parties but does not participate in them . Nick drives around the bay to East Egg for dinner at the home of his cousin, Daisy Fay Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, a college acquaintance of Nick's . They introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, an attractive, cynical young golfer with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship . She reveals to Nick that Tom has a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the "valley of ashes", an industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City . Not long after this revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom and Myrtle to an apartment Tom keeps for his affairs with Myrtle and others . At Tom's New York apartment, a vulgar and bizarre party takes place . It ends with Tom breaking Myrtle's nose after she annoys him by saying Daisy's name several times . </P> <P> As the summer progresses, Nick eventually receives an invitation to one of Gatsby's parties . Nick encounters Jordan Baker at the party, and they meet Gatsby himself, an aloof and surprisingly young man who recognizes Nick from their same division in the Great War . Through Jordan, Nick later learns that Gatsby knew Daisy through a purely chance meeting in 1917, when Daisy and her friends were doing volunteer services' work with young Officers headed to Europe . From their brief meetings and casual encounters at that time, Gatsby became (and still is) deeply in love with Daisy . Even more, he became obsessed with the idea of her, and the ideal of living in the world he saw her living in, as the fulfillment of all the possible dreams he could ever have . </P> <P> Jordan confides in Nick that the only reason Gatsby bought the mansion is because it was across the bay from Tom and Daisy's home, and that Gatsby's extravagant lifestyle and wild parties were an attempt to impress Daisy and raise her curiosity about her "anonymous" neighbor across the bay . Gatsby had hoped that one day curiosity would have brought the unsuspecting Daisy to appear at his doorstep, and thereby he'd be able to present himself as a "new man", now of wealth and position, and now able to join her at her side and within her world . That however never played out, and although Tom had been invited (as a guest of Jordan's) to a Gatsby party and had attended more than one of them, both he and Daisy had (for different reasons) never responded affirmatively to an RSVP to attend as the Buchanans (Mr. and Mrs .). The deeper reasons behind this fact are expanded upon later in the story by Daisy . His research of Nick, who has so fortuitously rented the small cottage next door to Gatsby's mansion, results in a wholly new approach to his problem of how to introduce Daisy to the "new" J. Gatsby . </P>

Meaning of the great gatsby as a whole