FREE ESSAY ON NICK, THE FLAWED NARRATOR

NICK, THE FLAWED NARRATOR

NICK CARRAWAY has a special place in this novel. He is not just one character among
several, it is through his eyes and ears that we form our opinions of the other
characters. 
Often, readers of this novel confuse Nick's stance towards those characters and the world
he describes with those of F. Scott Fitzgerald's because the fictional world he has
created closely resembles the world he himself experienced. But not every narrator is the
voice of the author. Before considering the gap between author and narrator, we should
remember how, as readers, we respond to the narrator's perspective, especially when that
voice belongs to a character who, like Nick, is an active participant in the story. 
When we read any work of fiction, no matter how realistic or fabulous, as readers, we
undergo a suspension of disbelief. The fictional world creates a new set of boundaries,
making possible or credible events and reactions that might not commonly occur in the
real world, but which have a logic or a plausibility to them in that fictional world. 
In order for this to be convincing, we trust the narrator. We take on his perspective, if
not totally, then substantially. He becomes our eyes and ears in this world and we have
to see him as reliable if we are to proceed with the story's development. 
In The Great Gatsby, Nick goes to some length to establish his credibility, indeed his
moral integrity, in telling this story about this great man called Gatsby. He begins with
a reflection on his own upbringing, quoting his father's words about Nick's 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 fibre with which to
withstand and pass judgment on an amoral world, such as the one he had observed the
previous 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. 
This is the first sign that we can trust this narrator to give us an even-handed insight
to the story that is about to unfold. But, as we later learn, 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 judging 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 Gatsby's 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 mere golf game. And while
he says that he is prepared to forgive this sort of behavior in a woman: It made no
difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame too deeply - I was
casually sorry, and then I forgot, it seems that he cannot accept 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
potential lovers - not only are they judged, they are judged by how well they stand up to
his own virtues. 
Nick leaves the mid-West after he returns from the war, understandably restless and at
odds with the traditional, conservative values that, from his account, haven't changed in
spite of the tumult of the war. It is this insularity from a changed world no longer
structured by the values that had sent young men to war, that decides him to go East, to
New York, and learn about bonds. 
But after one summer out East, a remarkable summer for this morally advantaged young man,
he decided to come back home to the security of what is familiar and traditional. He
sought a return to the safety of a place where houses were referred to by the names of
families that had inhabited them for generations; a security that Nick decides makes
Westeners subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. By this stage, the East had become for him
the grotesque stuff of his nightmares. 
What does this return home tell us about Nick? It is entirely reasonable that he would be
adversely affected by the events of that summer: the death of a woman he met briefly and
indirectly, who was having an affair with his cousin's husband and whose death leads to
the death of his next-door neighbor. His decision to return home to that place that he
had so recently condemned for its insularity, makes one wonder what Nick was doing during
the war? If the extent and the pointlessness of death and destruction during the war had
left him feeling he'd outgrown the comfort and security of the West, why has the armory
he acquired from the war abandoned him after this one summer's events? 
Don't we perhaps feel a little let down that Nick runs away from his experience in the
East in much the same way that he has run away from that tangle back home to whom he
writes letters and signs with love, but clearly doesn't genuinely offer? Is it unfair to
want more from our narrator, to show some kind of development in his emotional make-up?
It is unfair to suggest that this return home is like a retreat from life and a kind of
emotional regression? 
The only genuine affection in the novel is shown by Nick towards Gatsby. He admires
Gatsby's optimism, an attitude that is out of step with the sordidness of the times.
Fitzgerald illustrates this sordidness not just in the Valley of Ashes, but right there
beneath the thin veneer of the opulence represented by Daisy and Tom. Nick is in love
with Gatsby's capacity to dream and ability to live as if the dream were to come true,
and it is this that clouds his judgment of Gatsby and therefore obscures our grasp on
Gatsby. 
When Gatsby takes Nick to one side and tells him of his origins, he starts to say that he
was the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West - all dead now . . . The truth (of
his origins) doesn't matter to Gatsby; what matters to him is being part of Daisy's world
or Daisy being a part of his. Gatsby's sense of what is true and real is of an entirely
other order to Nick's. If he were motivated by truth, Gatsby would still be poor Jay Gatz
with a hopelessly futile dream. 
Recall the passage where Nick says to Gatsby that you can't repeat the past, and Gatsby's
incredulity at this. Nick begins to understand for the first time the level of Gatsby's
desire for a Daisy who no longer exists. It astounds Nick: I gathered that he wanted to
recover something . . . that had gone into loving Daisy . . . out of the corner of his
eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a
secret place above the trees . . . Through all he 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 Nick's words. Whose appalling sentimentality is operating here? Has Nick
reported any of Gatsby's words - which comprise so little 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 fact Nick's sentiment for Gatsby or perhaps Nick's attempt at
displaying those rather literary days he had in college? Or both? 
We should consider the distance that Fitzgerald has created between his presence in the
story and Nick's and their implications. Fitzgerald has created a most interesting
character in Nick because he is very much a fallible 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.