The World Of Nick Carraway
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is considered by many to be the great American novel.[i] Even though the tale regards the doomed love affair of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Faye Buchanan, the book is as much about the narrator, Nick Carraway, as is it about the enamored pair.
Nick, who happens to be Gatsby’s neighbor and Daisy’s second-cousin, inserts himself into the account by the way he tells the story. As heavy as his presence is, he is only the narrator. Fitzgerald is still the author, and he pulls Nick’s strings.
In other words, Fitzgerald uses Nick, not just as the character to tell the tale, but as a particular kind of narrator to say something about the story and to provide a sub-text the reader needs to understand.
But as it is always the problem of sub-text, the author is reliant upon the perceptive skills of the reader. No writer can stand over the shoulder of those who reads his book and offer his own commentary and explanations.
Before he wrote The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald declares that he wants to write something new, beautiful, simple, and intricate. These last two seem to contradict, so much so that most see the simplicity in the novel and ignore the intricacy.
Even Fitzgerald laments that no one seems to understand The Great Gatsby. It may be this ignored intricacy he wished would be noticed. I believe that this is the sub-text that comes from the narratorship of Nick Carraway.
Fitzgerald writes The Great Gatsby as a contemporary novel for his own time. It is set in 1922 and written in 1924. The Boom of the Jazz Age was a post-war party. It was a decade Fitzgerald called the world’s biggest orgy, and it ended with the Depression. G.I. Joe came home from Europe and danced with his girlfriend, maybe his wife, but ended up having to pay the band more than he could afford.
The world in which Fitzgerald lived is the same world he writes about existing on Long Island. Most have thus labeled The Great Gatsby as a commentary of the excess of the Twenties and the death of the American Dream. While this may be a layer, it must be much more than that.
The let-loose of this decade exchanged homecoming for virtue. Nick is thus a narrator set in a world of dissipation. It is not strange then if Nick is himself immoral. Nick’s struggles with telling the truth, which forces the reader to scrutinize everything he says as narrator and judge it as truth or error. This is done intentionally by Fitzgerald, hence his intricacy.
The Reliability Of Nick Carraway
Nick Carraway is a liar. That is not uncommon, but it comes into play in that Nick is the narrator of The Great Gatsby. This makes the storytelling problematic. But to accuse someone of dishonesty cannot be done lightly, even if it someone who doesn’t really exists. Such a charge must be proven or it becomes nothing more than pointless slander.
Examples of Lying
The novel begins by Nick insisting that he was “inclined to reserve all judgments” (5), and then spends the remainder of the book forming judgments of all the other characters.
Ø Tom is crude
Ø Daisy is shallow
Ø Jordan is dishonest
Ø George is spiritless
Ø Myrtle is sensual
Ø Catherine is worldly
