The Characters In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Throughout the course of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, The Great Gatsby, there are multiple times that the narrator, Nick Caraway makes the reader feel like they are part of the story and that is exactly what a good narrator is supposed to do. He not only is the narrator but he portrays himself as the omnipresent author. In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nick undergoes many kinds of change, through his encounters with Gatsby, his integrity level, and the deaths around him that change him from a naive adolescent, to a seasoned man (O’Rourke 185).

Nick appears in the story when he moves from Minnesota to New York (Fitzgerald 3). He moves to a part of Long Island called West Egg where his very wealthy neighbor was a man by the name of Jay Gatsby.

When he declines Gatsby 's business offer, and when he is genuinely freaked out by Gatsby 's associates, especially Meyer Wolfsheim who is said to of fixed the 1919 World Series (Fitzgerald 73). Nick feels not directly neighbor to neighbor, but indirectly through Jordan his cousin’s friend. She, unlike Nick, is incredibly dishonest and tainted by the scandal of having moved her ball during a golf tournament she was competing in. He is also more honest than Jay Gatsby because he apparently knows, since he is quick to tell Nick that Miss Baker was a great sportswoman and that she would never do anything that wasn’t alright (O’Rourke 186). For Nick, Gatsby’s lies, his pretentions, and his corruption are no matter; nor is his failures to win back Daisy; what matters is the sustaining belief in the value of striving for a wondrous object, not its inevitable disappearance and meaninglessness (Will 114). Through thick and thin Nick was always honest with Jay (Fitzgerald 59). Everybody around him is striving to be someone they aren 't but Nick is just trying to be himself. He speaks the truth about himself and the people he is surrounded by. Almost everyone else is hiding something about a relationship, where they come from, or who they are. Even though Nick was in the middle of

If the war made death new, Fitzgerald made it new again by refiguring it within a postwar perspective that sees death in postwar locales (James 282). Death happens on the highway, the lawn, and in a swimming pool; it happens to men but most spectacularly to a woman. In James 1:15 the Bible says, "Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death (New International Version, James 1.15)." When Nick first encounters the first death in The Great Gatsby it is Myrtle Wilson. With Myrtle being hit by a car because she ran out in the street, this only adds to the tension that has been building. This is the beginning of the downhill spiral of the stories reckless behavior. Even though Nick is still level headed his false innocence gives way to a more experienced Perspective through his survival and narration of these events (James 282). Even when he shows up at Jay’s Mansion to find him shot in his pool and Myrtle’s husband laying by the pool. Gatsby is used to show the death of the American dream. The American Dream is one of the pursuit of happiness, success, and wealth. Since the beginning of the story everyone has chased self-fulfillment. While Nick has come to learn the bond business but he is also in the middle of all the disarray that comes about from at the lies. Through being in the middle of all the