"The Great Gatsby", Nick Carraway & American Dream: a brief discussion

-: Analysis of characters of Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway (the Narrator) and contemporary American Society :-

Note: All page numbers are according to Penguin text of Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's long-held masterpiece, 1920s American is depicted in a confined and luxurious historical background with "a state of confusion and moral chaos". Though Fitzgerald asserts that he will follow Conrad for his narrative style, many critics argue that it's more close to Henry James, for its only essential-details. In one sense, The Great Gatsby (1925), is the story of Nick Carraway, the unifying first-person narrator of the novel, and what he made out of Jay Gatsby, the nominal hero of it. Nick is a Midwesterner whose aspiration to join the ranks of "Midas and Morgan and Maecenas" (P. 10) takes him to New York where he sales bonds. As narrator Nick recalls the events of the novel form two years afterwards.

The American dream of a common man

          After moving to West Egg, Nick rents a shabby, dilapidated house directly next door to mysterious, wealthy and much rumoured Jay Gatsby. At fast Nick goes to Gatsby's party with a look at interest towards Gatsby. His initial objective thought about Gatsby is that he is another rich man who knows nothing better than splurge money. However, the more Nick understands Gatsby, he is able to realize the essential helplessness and alienation lying at the heart of Gatsby. Nick realizes that Gatsby might have earned his wealth through shady means. However, money and power have not contaminated his soul.

Intimate Gatsby and Daisy

          Nick, the narrator does not appreciate Tom Buchanan's extramarital relationship with Myrtle Wilson. He also knows Gatsby's longing for Daisy's love and her loveless conjugal life. Once time and money which crept in them. That is why he sees nothing wrong in these two love-lorn-souls spending some time together which raises him above our narrow value of judgement and from a proper evaluation of life.

Valley of Ashes

          Nick's narrative written nearly two years after the experience of 1922, assesses events by investing them with significance. To achieve such understanding turns out to have been the real goal of his journey of discovery. As narrator, he shows himself able to share Gatsby's imaginative act of transforming the material world into "the promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world" (P. 67) while at the same time retaining a belief in the value of personal morality. He is both "within" and "without".

          Throughout his narrative, Nick interposes comments and explanations, some of them sounding rather priggish or smug, about his own ethical identity, and it is sometimes difficult for the reader to recognize whether they represent Nick the immature participant in 1922 or Nick as subsequent more experienced narrator. Once his father advised him that a gentleman should practise tolerance. Although he " boasting this way" of tolerance, it seems rather a cold attitude to adopt, implying detachment and disengagement from the plight of other people's lives. However, Nick's point seems to be that ethical principles are essential if one is to avoid inhabiting a world of different chaos where the ego prevails and where people like Tom and Daisy smash "things and creature" (P. 170). It is his considered judgement that Gatsby is to be admired for the series of gestures by which he remains loyal to his creative imagination, even to the extent of dying for it.

          Once Gatsby is dead, he takes the dead man's telephone calls as he has almost, in a way, assumed Gatsby's identity. He even imagines what Gatsby must have experienced at the point of death. He also sometimes thinks "that I was responsible, because no one else was interested" in Daisy-Gatsby relationship and subsequent Gatsby's death. Finding Gatsby's lovely funeral, compassion for him that Nick is too feel then. Time, the enemy of Gatsby's dream, is a necessary force in Nick's progress towards maturity and understanding. His concluding vision that the ideal can never be more than an aspiration which is easily lost in the business of living in a complex and confusing world of material ambition.

          Fitzerald allows Nick to claim authorship of the book. At a point, Nick is "Reading over what I have written so far" and commenting on his own reporting of the events of that summer. Fitzerald thus rejects the role of an omniscient author by allowing the personality of Gatsby to emerge through Nick's perception. As Nick's initial glowing images are modulated, the equally destroying westland of egotism seems to become paramount for him, at least in his nightmares. Ultimately, his synthesis of the westland and the dream ends the novel.