The Great Gatsby Commentary: Chapter 1

The opening excerpt from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby begins the novel with a clear sense of purpose. His strength of writing, both in terms of style and depth of meaning, persuasively establishes the characters of the narrator and novel's protagonist, Gatsby.
The passage can be divided into two sections, the first being a set up for the second, which works very effectively. There are two parts to the first section, one being the narrator's father's advice. The father's advice takes up the first six lines and is from the narrator's "younger and more vulnerable years" and sets u…