Jordan Baker In The Great Gatsby

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Pages: 4

The jaunty, angular lines of Miss Jordan Baker traipse across the pages of Gatsby only sporadically, essentially every time Nick deigns to pay attention to someone other than Gatsby. These crisp, fluid movements, however, paint a picture much more intricately layered than our unreliable narrator can bother to follow, and Jordan’s presence gives some indicator of how unreliable a narrator Nick can be; he sees the questionable exterior of Jordan and thinks his few observations have delved into her deepest being. Realistically, as with most of his judgments, Nick has barely scratched the surface, his final judgment of Jordan being that she is, yes, mesmerizing, but ultimately dishonest. Upon further inspection, her character becomes much more complex. Jordan's relationships and interactions with men that Nick perceives throughout his summer illustrate a severe overcorrection on her behalf. Her attempts to keep men at arm’s length more reflect her fear of her …show more content…
By the end of chapter three, he already has come to find what he believes to be her true self: "She was incurably dishonest" (Fitzgerald 58). Yet, at this point, his relationship with her has more or less consisted of scant interactions, presumably always with others abundantly present. In line with his tendency to build larger images on details skimpy, few, and far between, his basis for this assumption comes from mere scraps of evidence. Just before this conclusion that she is dishonest are these few conclusive examples of dishonesty; once she lied about leaving the top down in a car, and she may (or just as well may not have) been involved in a cheating scandal in her golf career. These two weak examples are enough to him to concretize his theory that she must be a