What happens at the end of The Great Gatsby — how it ends for Gatsby, Daisy, and Nick
There are two Great Gatsbys most people know: F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel and Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film with Leonardo DiCaprio. They end with the same deaths — but the film changes how Gatsby dies, who mourns him, and what happens to Nick. Here's how both versions play out.
The ending both versions share
After the showdown at the Plaza Hotel — where Tom Buchanan exposes Gatsby's bootlegging and Daisy admits she can't say she never loved her husband — Gatsby and Daisy drive back to Long Island in Gatsby's yellow car. Daisy is at the wheel. Outside George Wilson's garage, Myrtle Wilson — Tom's mistress — runs into the road and is struck and killed.
Daisy doesn't stop.
Gatsby takes the blame and spends the night watching her house in case Tom turns violent. Meanwhile, Tom points the grieving George Wilson towards West Egg. The next day, while Gatsby floats in his pool waiting for a call from Daisy, Wilson shoots him dead and then turns the gun on himself.
Daisy's ending is identical in book and film: she sends no flowers, no message, and simply vanishes with Tom — careless people retreating into their money while three others lie dead in their wake.
How Gatsby's death is different in the film
In the novel, the phone never rings. Gatsby dies still waiting, and Fitzgerald leaves it open whether he'd finally realised Daisy was never coming.
Luhrmann couldn't resist a crueller twist. In the 2013 film, the phone does ring in the instant before Wilson fires — and Gatsby dies with Daisy's name on his lips, believing she's finally called. She hasn't. It's Nick on the line. Gatsby dies happy, and completely wrong.
The funeral: three mourners versus one
The novel's funeral is a quiet gut-punch — hundreds swarmed the parties, and almost nobody comes:
- Nick Carraway — organises everything, ringing round people who are suddenly unreachable.
- Henry C. Gatz — Gatsby's father, up from Minnesota, clutching a self-improvement schedule his son wrote as a boy.
- Owl Eyes — the bespectacled guest from the library, the only party-goer who bothers.
The film cuts it to the bone. Gatsby's father and Owl Eyes don't exist in Luhrmann's version — Nick is effectively the sole mourner, while the press swarms outside painting Gatsby as Myrtle's killer and lover.
How Nick's ending changes
In the novel, a disgusted Nick breaks things off with Jordan Baker, confronts Tom on Fifth Avenue — where Tom admits sending Wilson to Gatsby's door — and moves back to the Midwest.
The film wraps all of this in a new framing device: Nick (Tobey Maguire) is in a sanatorium, diagnosed as a "morbidly alcoholic" insomniac, writing the whole story as therapy. In the final scene he finishes his manuscript, titled simply Gatsby — then adds two words by hand: "The Great". The Tom confrontation and the Jordan break-up are gone.
Both versions close on the green light and the same famous last line:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)