George Wilson
Myrtle's husband. He runs a failing garage on the road into New York.
To take his wife and leave the garage they live above. "I've been here too long. I want to get away," he says. "My wife and I want to go West."
The book
At a glance
- George B. Wilson — garage keeper, Myrtle's husband
- Repairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold.
- The valley of ashes, under the Doctor T. J. Eckleburg billboard, on the road between West Egg and New York
- Michaelis, who runs the coffee joint alongside — four years next door, and the closest thing he has to a friend
- A car Tom Buchanan keeps promising him next week
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeGeorge B. Wilson repairs cars and buys and sells them at a garage on the edge of the valley of ashes, in the shadow of the Doctor T. J. Eckleburg billboard. The business is failing. He and Myrtle live over it, and he has worked out nothing about her afternoons in the city, although his neighbour Michaelis and half the road have.
He is the poorest person in the book and the only one who works with his hands, and Fitzgerald gives him almost nothing else — no wit, no money, no self-possession, and, when Michaelis looks for someone to telephone on the worst night of his life, no friends. Nick's judgement of him is delivered in a single clause: there was not enough of him for his wife.
How the book draws them
- First seenThe proprietor appears in the office doorway wiping his hands on a piece of waste: “a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome.” When he sees Tom, a damp gleam of hope springs into his light blue eyes.
- The garageUnprosperous and bare, with one dust-covered wreck of a Ford crouching in a dim corner. Nick assumes at first that the place must be a blind for something more interesting upstairs.
- “When are you going to sell me that car?”The one thing he asks Tom, every time. Tom says next week, has his man working on it, and then threatens to sell it elsewhere when Wilson observes that the man works pretty slow.
- The ashA white ashen dust veils his dark suit and his pale hair, and he mingles immediately with the cement colour of the walls. His wife walks through him as though he were a ghost.
- The sicknessWhen he works out that Myrtle has a life apart from him, the shock makes him physically sick. Nick, watching him beside Tom, who has made a parallel discovery within the hour: “Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty.”
- “God sees everything”He tells Michaelis what he said to her at the rear window: she might fool him, but she couldn't fool God. Michaelis, standing behind him, sees that he is looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. “That's an advertisement,” Michaelis says.
He works it out too late and only partly. He finds an expensive dog-leash of leather and braided silver in his wife's drawer, locks her upstairs, and tells Michaelis they are moving away the day after tomorrow. That evening she runs into the road and . Michaelis sits up with him until dawn. In the morning he walks to East Egg with a revolver in his pocket, tries to force his way upstairs at the Buchanans', and Tom tells him who owns the yellow car — a thing Tom later explains to Nick on Fifth Avenue by saying that fellow had it coming to him. Wilson walks the rest of the way to West Egg, shoots Gatsby at the pool, and then himself. The newspapers settle on the word madman, and the case closes on it.
Wilson has no documented real-life model. The billboard he prays to does: the valley of ashes is the Corona dumps in Queens, which the Long Island road ran past, and the oculist's advertising hoardings of the period are the source of Eckleburg's eyes.