Nick as a Narrator
Nick as a NarratorF. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a story that deals with an array of topics that range from greed and corruption, to lies and deceit. Fitzgerald creates a masterful character, Nick Carraway. Nick is a character that posses all of the qualities of a true friend. He is trustworthy, honest, and the most important quality he posses is his unbiased and non-judgmental nature. All of the qualities that Nick possesses have helped to make him such a lovable character and an extremely effective, and reliable as a narrator which in turn makes The Great Gatsby such an interesting novel.
The first quality that makes Nick so effective is his trustworthiness. This trait is apparent in Nick from the beginning of the novel. The quality of trust that Nick has is necessary for a narrator. The narrator is the medium through which a story is told. This quality is demonstrated immediately by Daisy’s husband Tom Buchanan. Mr. Buchanan (Tom) decides to take Nick to “meet (his) my girl” (pg. 28) when Tom is acquainted with Nick for only a short period of time. This ability to confide in Nick shows how trustworthy he truly is. Gatsby demonstrates another example of this quality. Gatsby, like Tom Buchanan exposes a dark side to Nick early in their relationship. The dark side that Gatsby exposes to Nick is his deceitful ways, his bootlegging, and the association with Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who fixed the World Series of Baseball. When Gatsby so readily reveals his dark side, it is interesting. Gatsby tries so hard to be like the “Old Money” characters in the book, people similar to the Buchanans who shun the tactics Gatsby used to acquire his wealth. Even with his desire to be accepted ever present’, he still reveals to Nick the methods by which he acquired his fortune.
The next quality that makes Nick such a reliable and effective narrator is honesty. This quality helps strengthen the integrity of the novel. As stated before, the narrator is the medium through which the story is being told. For the narrator to be effective it must be trusted by the reader and go through events accurately, and objectively. Nick does this extremely well as a narrator. His narration of the events is not embellished. He is not affected by the insincerity of the other characters in the novel, and like Tom Buchanan and Gatsby, he does not have the burden of a dark side. This quality of Nick’s is best...
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