Where does Nick Carraway live?

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway lives in West Egg on Long Island, a suburb of New York populated by the “new rich.” He rents a small, modest house that sits next door to Gatsby’s enormous mansion.

West Egg represents newly acquired wealth—people like Gatsby who have made their fortunes recently and display it openly. Nick, though not especially rich himself, chooses to live there while working in New York as a bond salesman. At the same time, he has connections across the bay in East Egg, where his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom live among the “old money” elite. This puts Nick in a unique position: he is physically and socially between two worlds.

Nick’s in-between status shapes the entire novel. From his small house in West Egg, he watches Gatsby’s glittering parties, looks across the water toward Daisy’s dock, and gradually becomes the link between Gatsby’s hopeful dream and the entrenched world of old wealth. His home is a vantage point that lets him observe the divide between appearance and reality, new money and old money, ambition and emptiness.