The Great Gatsby Narrator Analysis

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Every great story has a secret hero, the narrator. In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, that narrator is Nick Carraway. His willingness to withhold judgment, his positive relationship with the main characters, his outsider status and his perceptiveness are the characteristics that make Nick the ideal narrator. Every narrator needs to be willing to withhold judgement if he is to be a great narrator. “In my younger and more vulnerable, years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments. …show more content…

A narrator needs to see things in great detail and be able to describe physical characteristics. “It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.” ( Fitzgerald 48 ) Nick’s ability to illustrate characters attributes is far better than any other character, and while describing physical traits is important, a narrator also needs to be able to notice subtle differences in human behavior. Throughout the novel Nick is describing every character's different behaviors and his opinion of their behaviors. One example is when Nick and Gatsby are talking after one of Gatsby’s parties. ‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.’ He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . . ( Fitzgerald 110 ) Nick see how Gatsby talks about his past and discerns that Gatsby is longing for the life he has already lived. Neither Tom nor Daisy would have ever notice how Gatsby talks about the past, they would have dismissed it as a man remembering his

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