Great Gatsby

Great Gatsby 3

Write an essay about the character and function of Nick Carraway.

Despite the title, Nick Carraway is the first character we meet, and

appropriately his role in The Great Gatsby is crucial; without him the

story would lack balance and insight. The first chapter is primarily

dedicated in establishing his personality and position in the book, then

moving on to Tom and Daisy. Nick is our‘ guide, path finder’

in The Great Gatsby; he relates the story as he has seen it and from what

others have told him. He strives at all times to be objective, his

comments are balanced, as he says just in the first page of the

book–‘ I’m inclined to reserve all judgements’.

His objectivity is reinforced throughout to us by his scorn of

Gatsby– he thoroughly disapproves of him– he‘

represented everything for which I have unaffected scorn’. Yet

there is something–‘ some heightened sensitivity to the

promises of life’,‘ an extraordinary gift for hope’

that is attractive to Nick, and requires him to make several attempts at

describing it. He registers contempt for much of what Gatsby stands

for– the falseness, the criminality, but still he likes him. His

ability to laugh at Gatsby and his false airs‘ What was that? . . .

The picture of Oxford?’ shows he’s neither charmed nor wholly

disgusted by Gatsby. Nick sees him as the best of a‘ rotten

crowd’, his approval is always relative– compared to Tom and

Daisy his dream like innocence is attractive, though twisted into an

impossible goal and only nearly achieved by criminality. But compared to

Tom’s ruthless attitude to Myrtle and Wilson, Daisy’s

careless abandonment of Gatsby and ultimately their complete inability to

see their wrong–‘ if you think I didn’t have my share

of suffering . . . I sat down and cried like a baby’– put

Gatsby in a much fairer light. As Nick says, Gatsby was‘ worth the

whole damn bunch put together’.

His amusingly contemptuous remarks show his sense of humour, and although

he is straight-laced, we are not bored by him. We are told of his

age– thirty, which makes us take his opinions seriously, as he is

not some immature unworldly man.

Nick is introduced directly, but Gatsby remains a distant character for a

good while. The establishment of Nick’s reflective, tolerant

personality is essential, as are his limitations, so we don’t just

dismiss him as Fitzgerald’s mouthpiece. The fact that he

disapproves of Gatsby so early on, helps us to go along with his

judgements when he tells us of Gatsby and unfolds the story.

Our first mysterious glimpse of Gatsby prepares us for much of what is to