The chapter opens with Nick Carraway recalling his father’s admonition to reserve judgment, a lesson that has shaped his habit of listening to strangers’ confidences. He describes his Midwestern heritage: three generations of Carraways who built a wholesale hardware business, his graduation from Yale in 1915, service in the Great War, and his decision after the war to abandon the Midwest for the bond business in New York. With his father’s financial backing he travels east in the spring of 1922, rents a weather‑beaten bungalow in West Egg for eighty dollars a month, and briefly keeps a dog before it runs away. He buys a dozen volumes on banking and credit, recalling his literary past at Yale.

Nick narrates his arrival in West Egg, a less fashionable tip of a peninsula that juts into Long Island Sound, situated opposite a colossal mansion he later learns belongs to Jay Gatsby. He meets a stranded traveler who asks for directions to West Egg, and Nick, feeling suddenly useful, guides him.

The narrative shifts to a dinner at the Buchanan estate in East Egg. Tom Buchanan, a former New Haven football star now wealthy and brutish, greets Nick on his grand French‑windowed porch. Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s second‑cousin once, appears in a white dress, charming yet cynical. The dinner party also includes a young woman referred to as Miss Baker (later identified as Jordan Baker), a slender, sporty guest who mentions an upcoming tournament in Westchester.

During the meal Tom launches into a tirade about Nordic superiority, citing a book by “Godard” and warning that the white race must guard against “the colored empires.” Daisy responds with bitter sarcasm, while Miss Baker interjects briefly. The conversation drifts to Daisy’s three‑year‑old daughter, whose birth Daisy describes with a mix of melancholy and resigned hope that a girl should be a “beautiful little fool.” Tom later references a rumored woman in New York, and the table exchanges rumors that Nick is engaged to a girl out west—a rumor Nick denies.

After dinner, the guests move to a veranda where candles are briefly lit and extinguished. Daisy whispers a family secret about the butler’s nose; Tom and Nick discuss the bond business; Daisy and Nick talk about the “longest day of the year” and a plan to go to the stables, which is aborted by a telephone ring. The evening ends with Tom and Daisy retreating inside, while Nick departs in his car, reflecting on the night’s strange mix of frivolity and underlying tension.

Driving back to his West Egg house, Nick muses on the summer heat and the quiet of the road. He pauses on his lawn, sees a solitary figure standing by the water, hands in his pockets, illuminated by moonlight. The figure is identified as Jay Gatsby, the mysterious neighbor, who gazes toward the water and, for a moment, appears to reach for a distant green light across the Sound before vanishing into darkness. Nick decides not to call out, leaving the chapter on an uncertain, anticipatory note.