I hope the describtion of some interesting moments encoureged you to begin to read this wonderful book. So to make it clear, let's turn to the depiction of the main characters

Nick Carraway

Nick Carraway was born in 1892 in Minnesota, Middle-West of the United States, as the son of a well situated family. Supposedly he was raised on stereotypical Midwestern values  ( hard work, perserverance, justice, etc.).  His grand uncle had started the family’s hardware business in 1851. He went to elementary, middle and high school in the Middle-West. After that he was sent to Yale University by his family. Nick was sent to France, when the United States entered the Great War in 1917, in order to fulfill his military service. After this time, in 1922, he decided to move to New York to learn the bond business, because the war had changed his perspective of the world. The rural narrow mindedness was not his world anymore. In West egg, a district of Long Island, he rented a small house, and became a neighbor of Gatsby. Nick is Daisy's cousin, which enables him to assist the love affair between Daisy and Gatsby. As a result of his relationship to these two characters, Nick is a perfect narrator for this novel even though he is not very reliable because he seems to be a real person who sometimes decides what should be hidden from other people, in this case – from the readers. Nick is also well suited to narrate The Great Gatsby because of his temperament. As he tells the reader in Chapter I, he is tolerant, open-minded, quiet, and a good listener, and, as a result, others tend to talk to him and tell him their secrets. Gatsby, in particular, trusts and treats him as a confidant.
Moreover, Nick is not only the narrator of the novel, but he plays a character in the story. I would say, that he is the only person in the whole book who is seeing the world in reality, even though he tells us what he wants us to know. Nick is the only character who understands, that Daisy and Tom as well as Gatsby only have eyes for money and their personal American Dream and do not care about others. Nick just wants to show that the urban people, he never really belonged to, only have eyes for showing their wealth. Nick is not the kind of urban people like Daisy, Tom or Jordan. Of course he is well situated but he does not have the need to show that to everybody. He is neither as rich as Gatsby or his Cousin nor poor but he polite enough not to show that to everybody. Nick ia Fitzgearld’s EVERYMAN , though in many ways he is much more. Jay Gatsby Gatsby is a man in his mid-thirties who lives an extravagant life which he finances with the money he has earned by “a good deal of money”. He likes showing off and always throws big parties at his mansion on West Egg/ Long Island. The fact that Gatsby lives on West Egg relates to his origin from the Middle West. At the age of 17 he changes his original name, James Gatz, to Jay Gatsby. He does that, because the name sounds typically European and he does not want people to know his being a newly-rich. During that time immigrants just like upstarts were not accepted by the upper class. Being a young soldier, he falls in love with a rich girl named Daisy Fay. When Gatsby has to leave her for serving the U.S. Army in the Great War their relationship splits up. After the war, because of several circumstances, he has to attend Oxford College in England. As he comes back to the United States he finds his great love married to another man and thinks his only possible chance to get Daisy back is being rich. This idea is stuck in his head and trying to get his love back is the only thing he lives for. Little by little Gatsby loses his sense of reality completely. He is a dreamer, but to complete his dream of living a perfect life he has to reunite with Daisy. Therefore he moves to New York and makes a lot of money with illegal business. He throws party after party hoping Daisy would join one of them. This shows that Gatsby is a very dedicated person. He tries everything to get Daisy back. The people who attend his parties see Gatsby as a gentleman. However, his shy behaviour towards them makes them gossip about him. Keeping his past a secret people connect it with criminal affairs. Nevertheless in Gatsby´s opinion gossip is better than his biggest fear coming true, not being respected by those upper class people and to being seen as a nobody. All in all Gatsby is totally lost in his dream world and not able to find back to reality. Daisy Buchanan Daisy Fay Buchanan is originally from a good family in Louisville, Kentucky. She is Nick Carraway’s  cousin once removed. After marrying Tom Buchanan, a very rich man, she moves to East Egg, Long Island. She is the mother of a little girl. Daisy is a woman who likes to play with men , she loves to exagorate and extemporize. Most men are fascinated by her , and Daisy enjoys being the center of attention . She also hopes to be liked and popular among the men around her. She wants to impress men including Gatsby by using sophisticated language. She, for example, says: "The pompadour! You never told me you had a pompadour – or a yacht". Daisy promises more than she gives and oftentimes does not tell the truth. She has a strong desire for love. Mainly for this reason she married Tom, instead of Gatsby. Since she did not know if Gatsby was to come back from Oxford, she did not want to wait for him any longer. Wanting to be loved is a reason for her superficial behavior and why everything about her is just not real. Especially with Daisy knowing about her husband's infidelity, it is hard for her to change her behavior. Sometimes it can even be seen as cynical. Daisy says about herself: "I'm pretty cynical about everything". You can see that she does not really love her husband Tom and is not happy because of her near divorce from Tom. “Sometimes she gets foolish ideas in her head and doesn’t know what she’s doing” . Furthermore Daisy is careless person which you can see in her behavior when she has the hit-and-run accident in which Myrtle Wilson (Tom's mistress) is killed. Being used to getting young men's attention, she has learned to think only of herself no matter whether other people get hurt or not. Another reason for marrying Tom rather than Gatsby is because material things have a great importance to her. She was always “crying for a decision”  and wanted her life to be “shaped” . Tom was the one who bought her love with a $ 300,000 necklace. He can give her all the luxury Daisy needs for living. Even her voice “is full of money” . Nick says that Daisy's voice "couldn't be over-dreamed" . Her voice is "a deathless song".

Tom Buchanan As for me, Tom is the symbol of masculinity in the novel: he posses all the features of the ideal man , except for being unfaithful to his wife. The thought occurred to me after reading “ A farewell to arms” by E. Hemingway where one of the motives is the motive of masculinity, the idea that is often , if not to say always, depicted in his novels and stories. And as we already know, that both Fitzgerald and Hemingway were friends and belonged to the so-called “ lost generation” , it seemed quite sensible that their works  could have something in common. In this novel Tom Buchanan is the “bad boy”. Mr. Buchanan, Daisy Fay's husband, comes from an old social and immensely wealthy family. He is a Yale graduate showing also his high social standing and profanity. Because of his college reputation, he still has the nick-names “The Athlete” and “The Polo-Player” . He is oftentimes seen as an idol. Tom is a good-looking, sporty and though guy who has verifiable “physical accomplishments”. He is a sturdy, muscular man with “arrogant eyes” and a husky voice. Nevertheless, he has a racial attitude he, for example, disapproves intermarriage between the black and white race . He is very egoistic and has a high opinion of himself . Therefore Tom has no moral problems about his affair with Myrtle Wilson. He says of himself that he “has almost a second sight […] that tells [him] what to do”. This shows his careless behavior and his supercilious manner. Moreover he is a rude and violent person who sometimes acts boisterously and maliciously .
Never being confronted with the consequences of his faults, because of always running away when he is in trouble, he is described as a restless person. Jordan Baker Jordan Baker is also from Louisville, Kentucky. Different to Tom and Daisy, her only living relative is an aunt. Being a famous professional golf player, she represents the new type of woman in the 20s. She is harsh, self-sufficient and always does her own thing meaning she does not need a man to help and guide her through life. Jordan is a very sportive and also masculine woman with an erect carriage. She is a “slender, small-breasted girl” . Jordan always wants to win whatever it takes. Being a very dishonest person she even lies in order to get what she wants. This is a reason why she tries to avoid meetings with clever men . Nevertheless she needs attention from the men surrounding her. Jordan basically just plays with the men's feelings and is not really interested in a relationship. You can see this very clearly when she tells Nick Carraway that she has a boyfriend. Nick Carraway, though, has a special relationship with Jordan in a for us maybe unbelievable way. One second they love each other but later both of them go their own direction again. They are on the same wave length. In general, Jordan also likes going to parties at Gatsby's house although she does not like the host himself . In The Great Gatsby Jordan plays an important role. She is the one who introduces Nick to Gatsby and her curiosity also leads us through the book and helps us find out more about the other main characters. Myrtle Wilson Myrtle Wilson is a “thickish figure of a woman”  in her “middle thirties” . Even though she is not very beautiful, she still seems attractive. Myrtle is George Wilson’s wife, as well as the woman Tom is having an affair with. She lets Tom push her around, just because she forgets the poor life, her husband can give her and feels like she is part of a life she dreams of, when she is together with him. Myrtle would rather be treated like a dog by someone who has money instead of being cared for by someone who has no money. George Wilson George Wilson, "a blond, spiritless man”  who is faintly handsome and pale. He is a representative of the working class ordinary people, who were ,and some of them still are, eager to reach something, to win through the difficulties of the life, to make their AMERICAN DREAM  come true. He is the owner of a garage in the Valley of Ashes, which shows that he is rather poor. His only hope for starting a new and better life somewhere else, seems to be Tom selling his car to him. But he does not see that Tom does not intend to sell his car and that it is just and excuse to show up there and to meet Myrtle. Wilson is ”so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive”  and that is the reason why he never notices that Tom is the one his wife is having an affair with. In the end, he is even so desperate that he is not able to think of another way than killing Gatsby and himself, to get out of his misery. Meyer Wolfsheim Wolfsheim is a “small, flatnosed Jew” who helped Gatsby making money in the bond business when he first came to New York after he returned from the war. He is Gatsby’s partner in selling alcohol illegally during the period of PROHIBITION.  Wolfsheim seems to have a dark past. He supposedly is the one who fixed the World Series of 1919. He turns out to be one of the cruelest and heartless characters of the book, as he intentionally didn’t appear at Gatsby’s funeral fearing that this could damage his reputation. Based on the material from http://www.ovtg.de