The Role Of Nick Carraway In The Great Gatsby

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The novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, tells the story of a young man, Nick Carraway, as he seeks fortune and a place for himself in high society. Fitzgerald chose to tell the story through Carraways’ point of view. The people at Thomson Gale describe Carraways’ role in the novel as, “… Nick Carraway narrates this novel; he is a keen observer of the American fairy tale come to life. As he uncovers more and more about Gatsby and his obsession with Daisy Buchanan, Carraway realizes the high price of materialism, envy, and desire (Gale 1). ” In the cookie cutter novel, the characters always learn something, but Carraway never learns. Nick Carraway, who is supposed to be an honest narrator that wrote an accurate illustration of the …show more content…
He says, in a frustrated mumble, "I'm thirty… I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor (Fitzgerald 177)." So what is Nick lying to himself about? Is it that he believes he deserved this lavish lifestyle, or that any of it is rational. Reflecting back on the summer Nick expresses some disappointment, "When I came back… I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn (Fitzgerald 2)." In a way, Nick is saying that he cannot stand the presence of any more high-life people, that he literally spent the entire summer with without fail, and he just cannot handle them anymore, but Gatsby is excluded. Carraway cannot act as if he never liked Gatsby. Nick Carraway wanted to be Gatsby when he first came to West Egg, yet somehow Carraway still has the audacity to say, "I disapproved of him from beginning to end (Fitzgerald 154)." Maybe it is because the two of them could not be more …show more content…
Carraway is a realist and Gatsby was a romantic dreamer. Carraway only focus on Gatsby’s money and Gatsby was more concerned with love, hope, and the promise of happily ever after. Gatsby had finally been free of the materialistic life that had seduced Carraway. Yet there was something about Gatsby, besides his money, which completely entranced Carraway. Early in the book Carraway studied Gatsby and discovered, “He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself (Fitzgerald 48).” Even with this quality, Gatsby was obsessed with a fantasy; the Daisy he had fallen in love with was no longer existent. Gatsby reached so far back into him to find her that it quite literally killed him. It is at this point in the novel that readers find the real Nick Carraway The real Nick Carraway is a dishonest narrator who never can make up his mind about how he truly feels, and did not learn from other mistakes. Carraway should have learned from Gatsby that continually return to the past is fatal, but he did not lean at all. He went home and wrote an entire book about the past. F. Scott Fitzgerald