Nick Carraway in Great Gatsby Essay -- essays research papers

NICK CARRAWAY has a special place in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He is not just one character among several it is through and through his eyes and ears that the narration takes place. In this novel, slit goes to some length to establish his credibility, indeed his moral integrity, in telling this story to the highest degree this "great" small-arm called Gatsby. He begins with a reflection on his own raising, quoting his fathers words about chips "advantages, which we could assume were material but, he soon makes clear, were spiritual or moral advantages. Nick wants his reader to know that his upbringing gave him the moral fiber with which to withstand and pass judgment on an amoral world, such as the one he had observed the antecedent summer. He says, rather pompously, that as a consequence of such an upbringing, he is "inclined to reserve all judgments" about other people, but then goes on to say that such "tolerance . . . has a limit. Th is is the first sign the narrator gives the reader to show he will give an even-handed insight to the story that is about to unfold. Later the reader learns he neither reserves all judgments nor does his tolerance reach its limit. Nick is very partial in his way of telling the story about several characters. He admits early into the story that he makes an exception of judgement Gatsby, for whom he is prepared to suspend both the moral code of his upbringing and the limit of intolerance, because Gatsby had an "extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness. This inspired him to a level of friendship and loyalty that Nick seems unprepared to extend towards others in the novel. Nick overlooks the moral implications of Gatsbys bootlegging, his association with speakeasies, and with Meyer Wolfsheim, the man rumored to have fixed the World Series in 1919. Yet, he is contemptuous of Jordan Baker for cheating in a unmixed golf game. While he says that he is prepared to forgive this sort of behavior in a woman "It made no difference to me. treachery in a woman is a thing you never blame too deeply - I was casually sorry, and then I forgot," it seems that he cannot aim her for being "incurably dishonest" and then reflects that his one "cardinal virtue" is that he is "one of the few honest people" he has ever known. When it comes to judging women - or perhaps only pote... ...e said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago . . ." These are Nicks words. Whose "appalling sentimentality" is operating here? Has Nick reported any of Gatsbys words - which comprise so gnomish of the novel - to suggest that he would even begin to put his love for Daisy in these "sentimental" terms? Is not this excess of sentiment in occurrence Nicks sentiment for Gatsby or perhaps Nicks attempt at displaying thos e "rather literary" days he had in college? Or both? The reader should consider the blank that Fitzgerald has created between his presence in the story and Nicks and their implications. Fitzgerald has created a most interesting character in Nick because he is very much a faint storyteller. When an author unsettles an accepted convention in the art of storytelling by creating a narrator like Nick, it draws attention to the story as fiction, as artifice. Ironically, in doing this, he has created in Nick a figure who more closely resembles an average human being and thus has heightened the realism of the novel