Can we trust nick as a narrator

22 June 2018

The novel The Great Gatsby is written by an American writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He creates a character a thirty-year-old man, Nick, as a narrator to depict the story about Mr. Gatsby’s life. It is a story about him who comes from the western United States gets acquainted with a mysterious tycoon Gatsby who has a passionate dream of success and ideal life. By getting along with many riches, Nick finds that life in New York truly broadens his vision. But gradually, it also lets him sees the corruption, dishonesty, and moral decay of these ruthless materialists, which makes him realizes what kind of people Gatsby really is and leaves high praise for him as a “great” person. By portraying various lively characters’ personalities, behaviors, and glamorous lives, Nick as a narrator cleverly depicts these elements in beautiful and elegant words, displaying the fancy world and fickleness of human nature that he goes through.

However, Nick is not just a narrator that calmly narrates the lives of people in New York City on the side. He is also a highly involved character. Such as in the revel with Tom and his mistress; in Gatsby’s gorgeous and crazy party; when Gatsby decided to go away with Daisy; when Daisy drove fast and thus kill Tom’s mistress; and even finally in Gatsby’s funeral, Nick does take part in all of them. He participates in all the major events in the story, having deep connections with the three protagonists, Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and Jordan, yet he still describes as if he is a moral center that always could be trusted in the story and he could maintain a certain distance from all of them. He declares that he is in a neutral position all the time, claiming that he will “incline to reserve all judgments” and be calm and objective to the world, but actually, he holds traditional moral values ​​to the life of the cosmopolitan in a negative attitude. Moreover, what is interesting is that he denies the value of these extravagant, revels lives, but he has never left these things but is attracted by them until Gatsby dies. From seeing how he narrates the story of Gatsby and what he asserted in the narration, readers can know that Nick is an inconsistent person and it could be said that he is an unreliable narrator.

When Gatsby was immersed in his ideal dream, Nick seemed to be caught in subjective moral praise to Gatsby. “It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again”(3). He is particularly interested in qualities that hold similar values to him ​​and which he lacks. Most of these qualities come from Gatsby, the one who is the key figure in the novel and even is rose to the height of myth by Nick. From Nick’s narration, readers can see that Gatsby is a young, promising, and dreamer who is always optimistic in his ideals. He commits his whole life to pursue the ideal. And, to achieve this ideal, he must make it through possessing a certain wealth, status, reputation, and “a beautiful lover.” Although all Gatsby does to achieve his ideals are infamous, Nick Still creates a heroic and legendary story for him. His defense and beautification for Gatsby are not only because he is the only one who understands Gatsby’s thoughts and thus has sympathy for him, but also because Gatsby comes from western America and had a relatively simple-minded and romantic personality that different from which of the people in a complex city. “Perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly inadaptable to Eastern life” (112). This kind of character is in stark contrast to the ugly humanity and cruel reality in the city, and it is this contrast highlights Gatsby’s unusualness.

After Gatsby passes away, Nick is completely disappointed with the lives of people in Eastern New York.

When I come back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be uniform and at a sort of fuzzy attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with a privileged glimpse into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction (3).

One of the keys that make Nick disappointed in New York and leave is the car accident. In the event, the one that has the greatest impact on Nick is Jordan Baker who has a relationship with him. Jordan is a friend of Daisy and Tom. She is similar in character to Nick. They are all cynical and get used to maintaining a certain distance from everything in the world, just like a flaneur. But after the accident, Jordan’s careless attitude completely extinguished Nick’s fascination with her. “I was feeling sick and I wanted to be alone.” “I’d had enough of all of them for one day, and suddenly that includes Jordan too” (91). Her posture, attitude, and beauty, and even Tom, Daisy, and all other things that represent old money are suddenly replaced by disappointment and disgust in Nick’s mind. “No－Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men”(4). Comparing to those wealthy, materialistic, selfish, and lacking sympathy people, Gatsby, who only pursues the dream built by himself, appears to have more humanity.

In Nick’s eyes, the motivation behind Gatsby’s behaviors is comparably simple and all things he had done seem can be forgiven. Gatsby lives an extravagant life as the people Nick thinks “a rotten crowd”, but according to Nick’s narration, readers can understand that neither wealth nor beauty is Gatsby’s fascination at all. What he is longing for is the affirmation and recognition of the self-worth bring about by those substances that allow him to escape from his inferiority of humble origin; to become what he wanted to be; to be able to win back Daisy and back to the past happiness. And there is nothing more. Therefore, to Nick, Gatsby is not only a man who is good at taking action for his ideals but is hopelessly passionate about the future, not a criminal. Even if he has done many illegal transactions, sometimes the confidence between his words is as exaggerated as it is trustless, but to Nick, Gatsby does not aim to lie or harbor unkind thoughts. His words and deeds come from the rich imagination of his romantic fantasy, and this kind of romance is doom to be tragic. Just like when Nick tells him that “you can’t repeat the past”, he cries incredulously and says “why of course you can!’ He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand” (70). He is confident that he could return to the past when Daisy and he love each other without any obstacles, and could “fix everything just the way it was before” (71).

In addition, Gatsby is ultimately an honest person for Nick. When Tom asks Gatsby if he had graduated from Oxford, Gatsby changes his exaggerated rhetoric but says bluntly that he only stayed there for five months due to the government’s arrangements with the military officers after the war. Gatsby’s honest confession is highly praised by Nick. “I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before” (82). Even at the beginning of the novel, Nick once said Gatsby “represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn” (3); he still fully demonstrates his trust in Gatsby.

Nick doesn’t recognize that his perspective on things is not as objective as he imagines. He is not as calm as he claims to be, and he also doesn’t keep a distance from everyone all the time. For readers, not only because he has repeatedly claimed that he is an honest moral center but his words took strong subjective opinion which especially toward Gatsby, therefore, he could not be a reliable narrator. Since the romantic ideal that Gatsby possessed was exactly what Nick lacks and is difficult to achieve, so when he describes Gatsby’s life and comments on him, to some extent, he might have projected some ideal of himself on Gatsby and the praise of him. Therefore, he highly romanticized Gatsby’s life. He tends to evade the moral criticism of Gatsby, distorts Gatsby’s behavior and personality in a good way, and filters what he experiences to readers to a certain extent to construct Gatsby’s world that he recognizes.

Although Nick is a narrator who cannot be fully convinced, his remembrance of Gatsby’s, memories, and his grief for this life that was gone so quickly are still quite moving. When a person who represents rationality, seriousness, and reality meets another person who represents romance, imagination, and passion for life, both of them would live totally different lives and their perception of things is far from a distance. Readers may then understand why Gatsby’s impact on Nick is so great now: such differences are in fact a wonderful and deniable attraction for Nick. For example, when he was preparing to leave New York at the end of the novel, he mentioned that the eastern life “excited me most” (112). He is curious about the people and the big cities that are in opposition to him, but he also maintains certain principles and values ​​that cannot be discarded, when he sees the dark side of these individuals, Gatsby’s simple longing and imagination of life and dreams are instantly lifted to a considerable height, and as time go on, the result that Gatsby is romanticized by Nick seems to be excusable and unavoidable.

However, to produce the authenticity of the character in his book, Nick actually wants to stand in a neutral position to describe the things he had experienced and to record the extraordinary person, Gatsby, he had encountered. Hence, whatever in the beginning or the middle of the text, he constantly declares himself to be a reliable narrator and does not judge other people arbitrarily. He tries to gain the trust of his readers and let them accept that Gatsby is indeed a respectable and lovely person, trying to eliminate or change the unfair comments and imaginings of him in the world because in the end, those ruthless people not only did not give Gatsby a late apology, but they were still selfish, unethical, hopeless and unforgivable as before, and it seems to be their nature. Compared to them, even if Gatsby had done so many things illegally in the past, it does not really matter. His enthusiasm for ideals and perseverance in dreams is the most precious treasure that deserves to be remembered and chanted in this complex, mammonism, and morally decayed world.

After Gatsby passed away, when arranging his funerals, Nick realized how pitiful and tragic Gatsby’s death was. “I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone;” “it grew me upon that I was responsible, because no one else was interested－interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end”(104). Nick feels profound pity for Gatsby’s death. He has a brilliant time, but no one cares for he dies. Nick is the only person who can understand him and treat him sincerely. When Gatsby’s father asked him about who he is to Gatsby, Nick said “we are close friends” without hesitation. Perhaps it is the most obvious evidence and the simplest reason that why he seems highly romanticized him and makes his word, position, and reliability questionable in the text: his disagreement with Gatsby finally sublimated into compassion and tolerance, and these words would be the last things that could let him miss this great Gatsby.

Work Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Edited by Guy Renolds, Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2001.