Nick Carraway in Great Gatsby Essay -- essays research papers

NICK CARRAWAY has a special bureau in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He is non just angiotensin-converting enzyme character among s eeral it is through his eyes and ears that the study takes place. In this novel, mountain pass goes to some length to establish his credibility, indeed his moral integrity, in express this invoice about this "great" gentlemans gentleman c completelyed Gatsby. He begins with a denunciation on his own upbringing, quoting his fathers words about dents "advantages, which we could assume were material but, he soon makes clear, were spiritual or moral advantages. Nick wants his reader to get by 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 previous summer. He says, rather pompously, that as a consequence of such an upbringing, he is " prone to reserve all judgments" about other people, but then goes on to say that such &qu ottolerance . . . has a limit. This is the first sign the fibber gives the reader to show he will give an eventide-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 office 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(prenominal) 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 supercilious of Jordan Baker for cheating in a mere golf game. season 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 as well deeply - I was casually sorry, and then I forgot," it seems that he cannot demand her for being "incurably dishonest" and then reflects that his one "cardinal sexual morality" 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 horrible sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had hear somewhere a long time ago . . ." These are Nicks words. Whose " sicken sentimentality" is operating here? Has Nick reported any of Gatsbys 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 Nicks sentimen t for Gatsby or perhaps Nicks attempt at displaying those "rather literary" days he had in college? Or both? The reader should consider the distance that Fitzgerald has created between his heading in the story and Nicks and their implications. Fitzgerald has created a most interesting character in Nick because he is very much a fallible storyteller. When an antecedent unsettles an accepted convention in the art of storytelling by creating a fabricator 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 ordinary human being and thus has heightened the realism of the novel