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Best Character Analysis: Nick Carraway – The Great Gatsby

Book Guides

This makes Nick himself somewhat tricky to observe, since we see the whole novel through his eyes. How can you watch the narrator? This difficulty is compounded by the fact that Nick is an unreliable narrator—basically, a narrator who doesn't always tell us the truth about what's happening.

In this post we will explore what we objectively know about Nick, what he does in the novel, his famous lines, common essay topics/discussion topics about Nick, and finally some FAQs about Mr. Carraway.

Article Roadmap

• Nick's background
• Actions in the novel
• Quotes about and by Nick
• Nick as a narrator
• Nick as a character
• FAQ clarifying confusing points about Nick

Quick Note on Our Citations

Our citation format in this guide is (chapter.paragraph). We're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book.

To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of chapter; 50-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text.

Nick Carraway's Background

Nick grew up in the "middle West," (what we call the Midwest), in a wealthy family that was "something of a clan" (1.5). His family made their money from a wholesale hardware business his grandfather's brother began after sending a substitute to fight for him in the Civil War. Nick attended Yale, like his father, and then fought in WWI.

Upon his return, he found the Midwest incredibly boring and so set off for New York to become a bond salesman: "I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business" (1.6). Of course, we later find out that Nick's also getting away from a woman who expects that they're getting married, but Nick downplays this fact in his narration, which is one of our clues to his dishonesty.

To see how Nick's background intersects with the stories of the other characters in the novel, check out our Great Gatsby timeline .

Nick's Actions in the Novel

This is a summary of everything Nick does during the novel, leaving out flashbacks he hears from other characters. (For a complete summary of the plot, check out our book summary !)

At the beginning of The Great Gatsby , Nick Carraway takes up residence in West Egg, in a small house next to Gatsby's enormous mansion. The year is 1922, the stock market is booming, and Nick has found work as a bond salesman.

In Chapter 1 , he is invited to his cousin Daisy Buchanan's home to have dinner with her and her husband Tom, an old college acquaintance of his. There he meets Jordan Baker, Daisy's friend and a professional golfer.

In Chapter 2 , while hanging out with Tom he ends up being dragged first to George Wilson's garage to meet Tom's mistress Myrtle Wilson, and then to the apartment Tom keeps for Myrtle in Manhattan. They invite over a bunch of friends and a drunken party ensues. Nick witnesses some of Tom's ugliest behavior, including his physical abuse of Myrtle.

In Chapter 3 , Nick is invited to attend one of Jay Gatsby's famous parties. There, he finally meets Gatsby, and also sees Jordan again. After seeing Jordan again at that party, they begin to date, and also does his best to win over her old Aunt, who controls her money. Once he starts dating Jordan he vows to stop sending weekly letters to the woman back in the Midwest. (Though, in typical Nick fashion, he never confirms that he stops sending the letters.) He also mentions a brief affair with a woman in his office that he lets fizzle out.

After meeting Gatsby in Chapter 3 they begin spending time together. In Chapter 4 they drive to Manhattan together. At first he's pretty wary of Gatsby and his story. This wariness of Gatsby is compounded by Nick's poor (and very anti-Semitic!) impression of Meyer Wolfsheim, one of Gatsby's associates. Later in Chapter 4, Nick meets up with Jordan in the plaza hotel and she tells him about Daisy and Gatsby's romantic history (which she heard all about at the previous party).

Nick agrees to arrange a meeting between Daisy and Gatsby, which occurs in Chapter 5 .

In Chapter 6 , Nick goes to Gatsby's house and witnesses an awkward exchange between Gatsby, a couple named Sloane, and Tom Buchanan. The trio had stopped by Gatsby's house and Gatsby misreads how serious they are about having dinner together. Later, Tom and Daisy attend one of Gatsby's parties. Tom is immediately suspicious about where Gatsby gets his money while Daisy has a bad time, looking down her nose at the affair. Gatsby confides in Nick afterwards that he wants to repeat his past with Daisy.

In Chapter 7 , Nick is invited along to a lunch party at Tom and Daisy Buchanan's house, along with Gatsby and Jordan. Gatsby is hoping Daisy will tell Tom that she never loved him and is leaving him for Gatsby, but starts to feel nervous doing that in Tom's house. Daisy is anxious as well and suggests they all go to Manhattan. Nick rides to Manhattan with Tom and Jordan, in Gatsby's yellow car. They stop by the Wilson's garage, where he learns that George has discovered Myrtle's affair, but not the man she is cheating on him with.

In Manhattan, the group rents a room at the Plaza hotel. A bunch of secrets come out, including the fact that Tom knows Gatsby is a bootlegger. Daisy tries to say she never loved Tom but can't stand by the statement, Tom, satisfied he's won, tells Gatsby to take Daisy back home in his yellow car while he drives back with Nick and Jordan.

Perhaps the least subtle car in the history of cars.

On the way back, they come along Myrtle Wilson's death scene: she has been hit by the yellow car. Later that night, Nick stays outside of the Buchanans' house while waiting for a cab back to West Egg, too disgusted with their behavior to go inside. He sees Gatsby waiting outside—he wants to make sure Daisy is alright. Meanwhile, Nick spots Tom and Daisy inside looking like co-conspirators.

In Chapter 8 , Nick goes to work but can't concentrate. Jordan calls him to say where she's staying, but he's disgusted she doesn't seem shaken by Myrtle's death and they fight and break up. Nick later spends time with Gatsby in his mansion and learns his whole life story. The next day, Gatsby is shot and killed by George Wilson (and George kills himself).

In Chapter 9 , Nick struggles to arrange a funeral for Gatsby, which in the end is only attended by Gatsby's father and Owl Eyes. Disgusted with the morally lawless life in the East, he decides to retreat back home to the Midwest.

Key Nick Carraway Quotes

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 any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." (1.1-2)

The first lines establish Nick as thoughtful, thorough, privileged, and judgmental. This line also sets the tone for the first few pages, where Nick tells us about his background and tries to encourage the reader to trust his judgment. While he comes off as thoughtful and observant, we also get the sense he is judgmental and a bit snobby.

To see more analysis of why the novel begins how it does, and what Nick's father's advice means for him as a character and as a narrator, read our article on the beginning of The Great Gatsby .

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. (1.4)

Another quote from the first few pages of the novel, this line sets up the novel's big question: why does Nick become so close to Gatsby, given that Gatsby represents everything he hates? It also hints to the reader that Nick will come to care about Gatsby deeply while everyone else will earn his "unaffected scorn." While this doesn't give away the plot, it does help the reader be a bit suspicious of everyone but Gatsby going into the story.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. (3.171)

This is likely the moment when you start to suspect Nick doesn't always tell the truth—if everyone "suspects" themselves of one of the cardinal virtues (the implication being they aren't actually virtuous), if Nick says he's honest, perhaps he's not? Furthermore, if someone has to claim that they are honest, that often suggests that they do things that aren't exactly trustworthy.

Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired." (4.164)

Nick's interactions with Jordan are some of the only places where we get a sense of any vulnerability or emotion from Nick. In particular, Nick seems quite attracted to Jordan and being with her makes a phrase "beat" in his ears with "heady excitement." If there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired, it would appear Nick is happy to be the pursuer at this particular moment.

"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." (8.45)

This line, which comes after Myrtle's death and Tom, Daisy, and Jordan's cold reaction to it, establishes that Nick has firmly come down on Gatsby's side in the conflict between the Buchanans and Gatsby. It also shows Nick's disenchantment with the whole wealthy east coast crowd and also that, at this point, he is devoted to Gatsby and determined to protect his legacy. This hints to us that our once seemingly impartial narrator is now seeing Gatsby more generously than he sees others.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (9.153-4)

This is Nick's conclusion to his story, which can be read as cynical, hopeful, or realistic, depending on how you interpret it. You can read in detail about these lines in our article about the novel's ending .

Nick Carraway Character Analysis

Nick is the narrator, but he is not omniscient (he can't see everything), and he's also very human and flawed. In other words, he's an unreliable narrator, sometimes because he's not present for a certain event, other times because he presents the story out of order, and finally because he sometimes obscures the truth. (It takes most students two reads of the novel to even catch the fact that Nick has a woman waiting for him back in the Midwest.)

Because of his unreliable narrator status, the central questions many teachers try to get at with Nick is to explore his role in the story, how the story would be different without his narration, and how he compares to Gatsby.

In short, you often have to analyze Nick as a character, not the narrator. This can be tricky because you have to compare Nick's narration with his dialogue, his actions, and how he chooses to tell the story. You also have to realize that when you're analyzing the other characters, you're doing that based on information from Nick, which may or may not be reliable. Basically, nothing we hear in the novel can be completely accurate since it comes through the (necessarily) flawed point of view of a single person.

The best way to analyze Nick himself is to choose a few passages to close read, and use what you observe from close-reading to build a larger argument. Pay close attention to moments, especially Nick's encounters with Jordan, that give you a glimpse at Nick's emotions and vulnerabilities. We will demonstrate this in action below!

Nick as the Narrator

These first questions analyze Nick's role as a narrator.

Why Is Nick the Narrator and Not Gatsby?

Since Nick gives a roughly chronological account of the summer of 1922, we get to see the development of Gatsby from mysterious party-giver to love-struck dreamer to tragic figure (who rose from humble roots and became rich, all in a failed attempt to win over Daisy). If Gatsby was the narrator, it would be harder for Fitzgerald to show that progression, unless Gatsby relayed his life story way out of order, which might have been hard to accomplish from Gatsby's POV.

The novel would have also been a much more straightforward story, probably with less suspense: Gatsby was born poor in South Dakota, became friends with Dan Cody, learned how to act rich, lost Cody's inheritance, fell in love with Daisy, fought in the war, became determined to win her back, turned to crime. In short, Fitzgerald could have told the same story, but it would have had much less suspense and mystery, plus it would have been much harder to relay the aftermath of Gatsby's death. Unless the point of view abruptly switched after Gatsby was shot, the reader would have no idea what exactly happened to Gatsby, what happened to George Wilson, and finally wouldn't be able to see Gatsby's funeral.

Plus, with a narrator other than Gatsby himself, it's easier to analyze Gatsby as a character. Nick is very observant, and he is able to notice things about Gatsby, like the way he misses social cues , subtle shifts in his mood, and even smaller details like his arresting smile. We probably wouldn't have seen these facets of Gatsby if Gatsby himself were telling the story.

Finally, since Nick is both "within and without" the New York elite, he is an excellent ticket in to the reader—he can both introduce us to certain facets of that world while also sharing in much of our shock and skepticism. Nick is just like the "new student at school" or "new employee" trope that so many movies and TV shows use as a way to introduce viewers into a new world. With Gatsby as narrator, it would be harder to observe all the details of the New York social elite.

Is Nick Carraway an Unreliable Narrator?

In many ways, Nick is an unreliable narrator: he's dishonest about his own shortcomings (downplaying his affairs with other women, as well as his alcohol use), and he doesn't tell us everything he knows about the characters upfront (for example, he waits until Chapter 6 to tell us the truth about Gatsby's origins, even though he knows the whole time he's telling the story, and even then glosses over unflattering details like the details of Gatsby's criminal enterprises), and he's often harsh in his judgments (and additionally anti-Semitic, racist, and misogynistic).

As a reader, you should be skeptical of Nick because of how he opens the story, namely that he spends a few pages basically trying to prove himself a reliable source (see our beginning summary for more on this), and later, how he characterizes himself as "one of the few honest people I have ever known" (3.171). After all, does an honest person really have to defend their own honesty?

However, despite how judgmental he is, Nick is a very observant person, especially in regard to other people, their body language, and social situations. For example, in Chapter 6, Nick immediately senses Gatsby isn't really welcome at the Sloanes' house before Tom says it outright. Nick is also able to accurately predict Daisy won't leave Tom at the end of Chapter 1, after observing her standing in the door with Tom: "I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head" (1.150). If only Jay could have seen Daisy's intentions so clearly!

We also come away with a very clear understanding of the messy climax (Myrtle's death at the hands of Daisy in Gatsby's car, George Wilson's psychological decay and murder/suicide of Gatsby), since Nick tells the events from his point of view but also from Michaelis's, who owns a coffee shop near George Wilson's garage. In short, Nick delegates to another narrator when he knows he doesn't have enough information , and makes sure the reader comes away with a clear understanding of the fundamental events of the tragedy.

In short, you shouldn't believe everything Nick says, especially his snobbier asides, but you can take his larger characterizations and version of events seriously. But as you read, try to separate Nick's judgments about people from his observations!

Is Nick Actually the Hero of the Story?

A hero, or protagonist, is generally the character whose actions propel the story forward, who the story focuses on, and they are usually tested or thwarted by an antagonist.

So in the most traditional sense, Gatsby is the hero —he drives the action of the story by getting Jordan and Nick to reintroduce him to Daisy (which leads to the affair, confrontation in Manhattan, the death of Myrtle, and then the murder-suicide), he goes up against an antagonist of sorts (Tom), and the story ends with his death. Gatsby's story is thus a cynical take on the traditional rags-to-riches story.

However, some people see the protagonist as also the person who changes the most in the course of a story. In this case, you might argue that since Nick changes a lot during the novel (see below), while Gatsby during the story itself doesn't change dramatically (his big character changes come before the chronology of the novel), that Nick is in fact the protagonist. Nick's story is a take on the coming of age narrative—he even has an important birthday (30) in the novel!

Basically, if you think the protagonist is the character who propels the action of the story, and someone who has an antagonist, it's Gatsby. But if you think the protagonist is the person who changes the most, you could argue Nick is the hero.

Nick as a Character

We never get a physical description of Nick, so don't blame yourself if your mental image of him is bland and amorphous like this fellow.

How Does Nick Change Throughout the Novel?

Nick starts out naïve and hopeful about his summer, and his future in New York more generally, as revealed through his narration (this optimism about his own life is mixed up with his sharp, snarky characterizations of others, which remain mostly the same all through the novel).

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. (1.11-12) (emphasis added)

As the summer goes on, he meets someone wildly more hopeful than he is—Gatsby, of course—and he begins to be more cynical in how he views his own life in comparison, realizing that there are certain memories and feelings he can no longer access.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. (6.135) (emphasis added)

Finally, after the deaths of Myrtle, Gatsby, and Wilson, as well as the passing of his thirtieth birthday, Nick is thoroughly disenchanted, cynical, regretful, even angry, as he tries to protect Gatsby's legacy in the face of an uncaring world, as well as a renewed awareness of his own mortality.

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor." She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. (9.125-6)

After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction. (9.127)

On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. (9.150)

In short, as much as this is a novel about Gatsby's failed dream/love for Daisy, you could also argue it tells the story of Nick's loss of hope and innocence as he enters his 30s.

How Does Nick Feel About Gatsby? Why Does He Come to Like Him so Much?

Nick goes from initially taken with Gatsby, to skeptical, to admiring, even idealizing him, over the course of the book. When he first meets Gatsby in Chapter 3, he is drawn in by his smile and immediately senses a peer and friend, before of course Gatsby reveals himself as THE Jay Gatsby:

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. 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. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. (3.73)

In Chapter 4, Nick is highly skeptical of Gatsby's story about his past, although he is somewhat impressed by the medal from "little Montenegro" (4.32).

He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase "educated at Oxford," or swallowed it or choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him after all. (4.24)

He also seems increasingly skeptical after his encounter with Meyer Wolfshiem, who Nick describes very anti-Semitically. When Wolfshiem vouches for Gatsby's "fine breeding," (4.99) Nick seems even more suspicious of Gatsby's origins.

In Chapter 5, as Nick observes the reunion between Gatsby and Daisy, he first sees Gatsby as much more human and flawed (especially in the first few minutes of the encounter, when Gatsby is incredibly awkward), and then sees Gatsby has transformed and "literally glowed" (5.87). As Nick watches Gatsby blossom in Daisy's presence, I think Nick himself is won over by Gatsby. Notice how warm Nick's description is:

But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room (5.87)

In Chapter 6, Nick honestly and frankly observes how Gatsby is snubbed by the Sloanes, but he seems more like he's pitying Gatsby than making fun of him. It almost seems like he's trying to protect Gatsby by cutting off the scene just as Gatsby comes out the door, coat in hand, after the Sloanes have coldly left him behind:

Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod and they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August foliage just as Gatsby with hat and light overcoat in hand came out the front door. (6.59)

By Chapter 7, during the confrontation in the hotel, Nick is firmly on Gatsby's side, to the point that he is elated when Gatsby reveals that he did, in fact, attend Oxford but didn't graduate:

I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I'd experienced before. (7.221)

As the rest of the novel plays out, Nick becomes more admiring of Gatsby, even as he comes to dislike the Buchanans (and Jordan, by extension) more and more.

Why exactly Nick becomes so taken with Gatsby is, I think, up to the reader. In my reading, Nick, as someone who rarely steps outside of social boundaries and rarely gets "carried away" with love or emotion (see how coldly he ends not one but three love affairs in the book!), is admiring and even somewhat jealous of Gatsby, who is so determined to build a certain life for himself that he manages to transform the poor James Gatz into the infamous, wealthy Jay Gatsby.

Gatsby's fate also becomes entangled with Nick's own increased cynicism, both about his future and life in New York, so he clings to the memory of Gatsby and becomes determined to tell his story.

Is Nick Carraway Gay?

At first, this might not seem plausible—Nick dates Jordan during the book (and also admits to a few other love affairs with women) and at one point confesses to being "half in love with [Jordan]." So why do people think Nick is gay?

First of all, consider the odd moment at the end of Chapter 2 that seems to suggest Nick goes home with Mr. McKee:

"Come to lunch some day," he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.

"Anywhere."

"Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the elevator boy.

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't know I was touching it."

"All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to."

. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear , with a great portfolio in his hands.

"Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . . Brook'n Bridge . . . ."

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning "Tribune" and waiting for the four o'clock train. (2.128-136)

Nick's narration is confused and sporadic as he was quite drunk after the party. However, what we do see—the elevator boy chiding him to "keep your hands off the lever" (hint hint wink wink nudge nudge), shortly followed by Nick saying "I was standing beside [Mr. McKee's bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear"—seems to pretty strongly suggest a sexual encounter. And in a novel that is so short and carefully constructed, why add this short scene unless it's supposed to help us understand Nick?

Some people see that scene as a confirmation of Nick's sexual preference, or at least an indication he's attracted to men as well as women. However, since this was the 1920s, he couldn't exactly be out and proud, which is why he would never frankly admit to being attracted to men in his sober narration. So instead, as the theory goes, his love for and attraction to for Gatsby is mirrored through a filter of intense admiration. So, using this reading, The Great Gatsby is narrated by a man suffered from unrequited love.

Do you have to take this reading as fact? Not at all. But if you're curious you can check out a fuller write-up of the "Nick as gay" reading and decide for yourself.

Final Questions

These are questions students often have about Nick after reading the book, but ones that don't always come up in classroom discussions or essay topics. Read on if you still have unanswered questions about Nick!

Also, be sure to let us know in the comments if you have more questions about Nick!

What's Going on With Nick and Jordan's Relationship? Do They Actually Like Each Other?

Nick says in his opening narration that most people in the east have earned his "unaffected scorn," so it's confusing to see him cozy up to Jordan in the next few chapters (1.4). However, keep in mind that scorn is earned over the course of the novel, and Nick writes the opening narration looking back at everything. So before the tragic conclusion, Nick actually is strongly attracted to Jordan and hasn't yet realized that her attractive skepticism actually means she can be callous and uncaring. Our quote above from Chapter 4, as Nick finds himself attracted to the "hard, clean, limited" Jordan, illustrates that strong initial attraction.

But post break-up, do they still feel anything for each other? Their break-up scene is really helpful to analyze to answer this question:

"Nevertheless you did throw me over," said Jordan suddenly. "You threw me over on the telephone. I don't give a damn about you now but it was a new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while."

We shook hands.

"Oh, and do you remember—" she added, "——a conversation we had once about driving a car?"

"Why—not exactly."

"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride."

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."

She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. (9.130-136)

Jordan, for her part, seems to admit to having genuinely liked Nick when they break up at the end and was quite hurt. And Nick, for once, is a mess of emotions: "angry" and "half in love." So despite Nick's earlier proclamation that everyone from the east coast is the object of his "unaffected scorn," it would seem his attachment to Jordan is a bit more complicated: he's disgusted by some of her behavior and yet still feels a strong attraction to her, strong enough that he's angry and sorry during their break-up.

Of course, if you subscribe to the "Nick loves Gatsby" theory you could chalk much of this scene up to repressed desires, especially Nick's comment about not wanting to lie to himself.

Why Does Nick Say "You're better than the whole damn bunch of them"?

This statement officially marks Nick's disillusionment with the East Coast, old money crowd. Remember that this line comes after the car accident, and the scene in the hotel just before that, so he's just seen Daisy and Tom's ugliest behavior. Nick is proud of the statement since it was one of the last things he ever got to say to Gatsby.

What can be a bit harder to spot is when exactly Nick's earlier distrust of Gatsby morphed into respect. I argued above it begins in Chapter 5, when he watches Gatsby's reunion with Daisy and sees Gatsby transformed and enraptured by love.

What's Next?

Nick sets the stage in Chapter 1 by first explaining why he can be trusted as a narrator. Read our summary of Chapter 1 for more analysis as to why Nick's opening makes him a bit suspicious as a narrator.

Want to read more about Nick and Jordan's relationship ? Curious as to why they get together despite their differences in background? Read about love, desire, and relationships in Gatsby for more on their relationship.

Did Fitzgerald see himself as more of a Carraway or a Gatsby? Read our history of F. Scott Fitzgerald's life for more on the man behind the book.

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Halle Edwards graduated from Stanford University with honors. In high school, she earned 99th percentile ACT scores as well as 99th percentile scores on SAT subject tests. She also took nine AP classes, earning a perfect score of 5 on seven AP tests. As a graduate of a large public high school who tackled the college admission process largely on her own, she is passionate about helping high school students from different backgrounds get the knowledge they need to be successful in the college admissions process.

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• The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Literature Notes
• Nick Carraway
• The Great Gatsby at a Glance
• Book Summary
• About The Great Gatsby
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Character Analysis
• Daisy Buchanan
• Character Map
• F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography
• Critical Essays
• Social Stratification: The Great Gatsby as Social Commentary
• In Praise of Comfort: Displaced Spirituality in The Great Gatsby
• Famous Quotes from The Great Gatsby
• Film Versions of The Great Gatsby
• Full Glossary for The Great Gatsby
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Character Analysis Nick Carraway

Nick Carraway, the story's narrator, has a singular place within The Great Gatsby . First, he is both narrator and participant. Part of Fitzgerald's skill in The Great Gatsby shines through the way he cleverly makes Nick a focal point of the action, while simultaneously allowing him to remain sufficiently in the background. In addition, Nick has the distinct honor of being the only character who changes substantially from the story's beginning to its end. Nick, although he initially seems outside the action, slowly moves to the forefront, becoming an important vehicle for the novel's messages.

On one level, Nick is Fitzgerald's Everyman, yet in many ways he is much more. He comes from a fairly nondescript background. He hails from the upper Midwest (Minnesota or Wisconsin) and has supposedly been raised on stereotypical Midwestern values (hard work, perseverance, justice, and so on). He is a little more complex than that, however. His family, although descended from the "Dukes of Buccleuch," really started when Nick's grandfather's brother came to the U.S. in 1851. By the time the story takes place, the Carraways have only been in this country for a little over seventy years — not long, in the great scope of things. In addition, the family patriarch didn't exhibit the good Midwestern values Nick sees in himself. When the civil war began, Nick's relative "sent a substitute" to fight for him, while he started the family business. This little detail divulges a few things: It places the Carraways in a particular class (because only the wealthy could afford to send a substitute to fight) and suggests that the early Carraways were more tied to commerce than justice. Nick's relative apparently doesn't have any qualms about sending a poorer man off to be killed in his stead. Given this background, it is interesting that Nick would come to be regarded as a level-headed and caring man, enough of a dreamer to set goals, but practical enough to know when to abandon his dreams.

Also contributing to Nick's characterization as an Everyman are his goals in life. He heads East after World War I, seeking largely to escape the monotony he perceives to permeate the Midwest and to make his fortune. He is an educated man who desires more out of life than the quiet Midwest can deliver (although it is interesting that before living in the city any length of time he retreats to the country). What helps make Nick so remarkable, however, is the way that he has aspirations without being taken in — to move with the socialites, for example, but not allowing himself to become blinded by the glitz that characterizes their lifestyle. When he realizes what his social superiors are really like (shallow, hollow, uncaring, and self-serving), he is disgusted and, rather than continuing to cater to them, he distances himself. In effect, motivated by his conscience, Nick commits social suicide by forcefully pulling away from people like the Buchanans and Jordan Baker.

In addition to his Everyman quality, Nick's moral sense helps to set him apart from all the other characters. From the first time he interacts with others (Daisy, Tom, and Jordan in Chapter 1), he clearly isn't like them. He is set off as being more practical and down-to-earth than other characters. This essence is again brought to life in Chapter 2 when he doesn't quite know how to respond to being introduced into Tom and Myrtle's secret world (notice, however, that he doesn't feel the need to tell anyone about his adventures).

In Chapter 3, again Nick comes off as less mercenary than everyone else in the book as he waits for an invitation to attend one of Gatsby's parties, and then when he does, he takes the time to seek out his host. From these instances (and others like them spread throughout the book) it becomes clear that Nick, in many ways, is an outsider.

Nick has what many of the other characters lack — personal integrity — and his sense of right and wrong helps to elevate him above the others. He alone is repulsed by the phony nature of the socialites. He alone is moved by Gatsby's death. When the other characters scatter to the wind after Gatsby's death, Nick, unable to believe that none of Gatsby's associates will even pay their last respects, picks up the pieces and ensures Gatsby isn't alone in his death. Through the course of The Great Gatsby Nick grows, from a man dreaming of a fortune, to a man who knows only too well what misery a fortune can bring.

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The Great Gatsby

Nick carraway: an unlikely narrator sukayna ibrahim 11th grade.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby,” opens with this piece of advice quoted to Nick, the narrator of the story, by his father. Those words having stuck with him throughout the years, Nick explains that he is unbiased and “inclined to reserve all judgments” (Fitzgerald 1). As a narrator, these traits are crucial for an accurate account of the story, partially due to the fact that several characters throughout the novel contain faults that subject them to bias. However, Nick’s thoughts and actions prove to be contradictory to his self-description, which evokes the question of whether or not his narrative is accurate. Nick’s indecisiveness as well as his shallow and partial nature limits the extent of the reader’s trust, therefore making his narrative unreliable.

In his book, “Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days,” American literary critic Scott Donaldson, claims that Nick’s “basic contempt for mankind emerges in what he says and thinks as well as in descriptions of others.” Nick’s instinctive inclination to initially judge others’ physical appearances further justifies this...

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Life in West Egg and East Egg

Resurfacing gatsby’s past, a deadly crash and a shooting, setting and historical context, publication history, legacy, and adaptations, the meaning of the great gatsby.

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The Great Gatsby

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The Great Gatsby , novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald , published in 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Set in Jazz Age New York , it tells the story of Jay Gatsby , a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth .

Commercially unsuccessful when it was first published, The Great Gatsby —which was Fitzgerald’s third novel—is now considered a classic of American fiction and has often been called the Great American Novel.

• Who is Jay Gatsby, and what are the parties like at his house?
• How does Tom Buchanan react to the relationship that his wife, Daisy, has with Gatsby?
• What shocking event occurs when Daisy, seated beside Gatsby, is driving his car, and how does it affect everyone involved?
• How does The Great Gatsby capture the essence of the Jazz Age?
• How did The Great Gatsby ’s popularity change over time?
• What is the significance of West Egg vs. East Egg, and which wins in the end?

These AI-generated questions have been reviewed by Britannica’s editors.

Plot summary

The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway , a Yale University graduate from the Midwest who moves to New York after World War I to pursue a career in bonds . He recounts the events of the summer he spent in the East two years later, reconstructing his story through a series of flashbacks not always told in chronological order.

In the spring of 1922, Nick takes a house in the fictional village of West Egg on Long Island , where he finds himself living among the colossal mansions of the newly rich. Across the water in the more refined village of East Egg live his cousin Daisy and her brutish, absurdly wealthy husband Tom Buchanan. Early in the summer Nick goes over to their house for dinner, where he also meets Jordan Baker, a friend of Daisy’s and a well-known golf champion, who tells him that Tom has a mistress in New York City . In a private conversation, Daisy confesses to Nick that she has been unhappy. Returning to his house in West Egg, he catches sight of his neighbor Jay Gatsby standing alone in the dark and stretching his arms out to a green light burning across the bay at the end of Tom and Daisy’s dock.

Early in July Tom introduces Nick to his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, who lives with her spiritless husband George Wilson in what Nick calls “a valley of ashes”: an industrial wasteland presided over by the bespectacled eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, which stare down from an advertising billboard. Meeting her at the garage where George works as a repairman, the three of them go to Tom and Myrtle’s apartment in Manhattan. They are joined by Myrtle’s sister and some other friends who live nearby, and the evening ends in heavy drunkenness and Tom punching Myrtle in the nose when she brings up Daisy. Nick wakes up in a train station the morning afterward.

As the summer progresses, Nick grows accustomed to the noises and lights of dazzling parties held at his neighbor’s house, where the famous and newly rich turn up on Saturday nights to enjoy Gatsby’s well-stocked bar and full jazz orchestra. Nick attends one of these parties when personally invited by Gatsby and runs into Jordan, with whom he spends most of the evening. He is struck by the apparent absence of the host and the impression that all of his guests seem to have dark theories about Gatsby’s past. However, Nick meets him at last in a rather quiet encounter later in the evening when the man sitting beside him identifies himself as Gatsby. Gatsby disappears and later asks to speak to Jordan privately. Jordan returns amazed by what he has told her, but she is unable to tell Nick what it is.

Nick begins seeing Jordan Baker as the summer continues, and he also becomes better acquainted with Gatsby. One afternoon in late July when they are driving into Manhattan for lunch, Gatsby tries to dispel the rumors circulating around himself, and he tells Nick that he is the son of very wealthy people who are all dead and that he is an Oxford man and a war hero. Nick is skeptical about this. At lunch he meets Gatsby’s business partner Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who fixed the World Series in 1919 (based on a real person and a real event from Fitzgerald’s day). Later, at tea, Jordan Baker tells Nick the surprising thing that Gatsby had told her in confidence at his party: Gatsby had known Nick’s cousin Daisy almost five years earlier in Louisville and they had been in love, but then he went away to fight in the war and she married Tom Buchanan. Gatsby bought his house on West Egg so he could be across the water from her.

At Gatsby’s request, Nick agrees to invite Daisy to his house, where Gatsby can meet her. A few days later he has them both over for tea, and Daisy is astonished to see Gatsby after nearly five years. The meeting is at first uncomfortable, and Nick steps outside for half an hour to give the two of them privacy. When he returns, they seem fully reconciled , Gatsby glowing with happiness and Daisy in tears. Afterward they go next door to Gatsby’s enormous house, and Gatsby shows off its impressive rooms to Daisy.

As the days pass, Tom becomes aware of Daisy’s association with Gatsby. Disliking it, he shows up at one of Gatsby’s parties with his wife. It becomes clear that Daisy does not like the party and is appalled by the impropriety of the new-money crowd at West Egg. Tom suspects that Gatsby is a bootlegger, and he says so. Voicing his dismay to Nick after the party is over, Gatsby explains that he wants Daisy to tell Tom she never loved him and then marry him as though the years had never passed.

Gatsby’s wild parties cease thereafter, and Daisy goes over to Gatsby’s house in the afternoons. On a boiling hot day near the end of the summer, Nick arrives for lunch at the Buchanans’ house; Gatsby and Jordan have also been invited. In the dining room, Daisy pays Gatsby a compliment that makes clear her love for him, and, when Tom notices this, he insists they drive into town.

Daisy and Gatsby leave in Tom’s blue coupe, while Tom drives Jordan and Nick in Gatsby’s garish yellow car. On the way, Tom stops for gas at George Wilson’s garage in the valley of ashes, and Wilson tells Tom that he is planning to move west with Myrtle as soon as he can raise the money. This news shakes Tom considerably, and he speeds on toward Manhattan, catching up with Daisy and Gatsby.

The whole party ends up in a parlor at the Plaza Hotel, hot and in bad temper . As they are about to drink mint juleps to cool off, Tom confronts Gatsby directly on the subject of his relationship with Daisy. Daisy tries to calm them down, but Gatsby insists that Daisy and he have always been in love and that she has never loved Tom. As the fight escalates and Daisy threatens to leave her husband, Tom reveals what he learned from an investigation into Gatsby’s affairs—that he had earned his money by selling illegal alcohol at drugstores in Chicago with Wolfsheim after Prohibition laws went into effect. Gatsby tries to deny it, but Daisy has lost her resolve, and his cause seems hopeless. As they leave the Plaza, Nick realizes that it is his 30th birthday.

Gatsby and Daisy leave together in Gatsby’s car, with Daisy driving. On the road they hit and kill Myrtle, who, after having a vehement argument with her husband, had run into the street toward Gatsby’s passing car, thinking it was Tom. Terrified, Daisy continues driving, but the car is seen by witnesses. Coming behind them, Tom stops his car when he sees a commotion on the road. He is stunned and devastated when he finds the body of his mistress dead on a table in Wilson’s garage.

Wilson accusingly tells him it was a yellow car that hit her, but Tom insists it was not his and drives on to East Egg in tears. Back at the Buchanans’ house in East Egg, Nick finds Gatsby hiding in the garden and learns that it was Daisy who was driving, though Gatsby insists that he will say it was he if his car is found. He says he will wait outside Daisy’s house in case Tom abuses Daisy.

The next morning Nick goes over to Gatsby’s house, where he has returned, dejected . Nick advises him to go away, afraid that his car will be traced. He refuses, and that night he tells Nick the truth about his past: he had come from a poor farming family and had met Daisy in Louisville while serving in the army, but he was too poor to marry her at the time. He earned his incredible wealth only after the war (by bootlegging , as Tom discovered).

Reluctantly, Nick leaves for work, while Gatsby continues to wait for a call from Daisy. That afternoon, George Wilson arrives in East Egg, where Tom tells him that it was Gatsby who killed his wife. Wilson makes his way to Gatsby’s house, where he finds Gatsby in his pool. Wilson shoots Gatsby and then himself. Afterward the Buchanans leave Long Island. They give no forwarding address. Nick arranges Gatsby’s funeral, although only two people attend , one of whom is Gatsby’s father. Nick moves back to the Midwest, disgusted with life in the East.

Set in the Jazz Age (a term popularized by Fitzgerald), The Great Gatsby vividly captures its historical moment: the economic boom in America after World War I, the new jazz music, the free-flowing illegal liquor. As Fitzgerald later remarked in an essay about the Roaring Twenties , it was “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.”

According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the 1920s witnessed “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.”

The brazenly lavish culture of West Egg is a reflection of the new prosperity that was possible during Prohibition , when illegal schemes involving the black-market selling of liquor abounded. Such criminal enterprises are the source of Gatsby’s income and finance his incredible parties, which are probably based on parties Fitzgerald himself attended when he lived on Long Island in the early 1920s.

The racial anxieties of the period are also evident in the novel; Tom’s diatribe on The Rise of the Colored Empires —a reference to a real book published in 1920 by the American political scientist Lothrop Stoddard—points to the burgeoning eugenics movement in the United States during the early 20th century.

Fitzgerald finished The Great Gatsby in early 1925 while he was living in France, and Scribner’s published it in April of the same year. Fitzgerald struggled considerably in choosing a title, toying with Trimalchio and Under the Red, White and Blue , among others; he was never satisfied with the title The Great Gatsby , under which it was ultimately published.

The illustration for the novel’s original dust jacket was commissioned by Fitzgerald’s editor Maxwell Perkins seven months before he was in possession of the finished manuscript. It was designed by Francis Cugat, a Spanish-born artist who did Hollywood movie posters, and depicts the eyes of a woman hanging over the carnival lights of Coney Island . The design was well-loved by Fitzgerald, and he claimed in a letter to Perkins that he had written it into the book, though whether this refers to the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg or something else is uncertain. Cugat’s painting is now one of the most well-known and celebrated examples of jacket art in American literature .

While Fitzgerald considered The Great Gatsby to be his greatest achievement at the time it was published, the book was neither a critical nor a commercial success upon publication. Reviews were mixed, and the 20,000 copies of its first printing sold slowly. It was printed one more time during Fitzgerald’s life, and there were still copies unsold from this second printing when he died in 1940.

The Great Gatsby was rediscovered a few years later and enjoyed an exponential growth in popularity in the 1950s, soon becoming a standard text of high-school curricula in the United States. It remains one of Scribner’s best sellers, and it is now considered a masterpiece of American fiction. In 2021 it entered the public domain in the United States.

There have been several film adaptations of the novel, most notably a production directed by Jack Clayton in 1974, starring Robert Redford as Gatsby, and one in 2013 directed by Baz Luhrmann , starring Leonardo DiCaprio .

Above all, The Great Gatsby has been read as a pessimistic examination of the American Dream . At its center is a remarkable rags-to-riches story, of a boy from a poor farming background who has built himself up to fabulous wealth. Jay Gatsby is someone who once had nothing but who now entertains rich and celebrated people in his enormous house on Long Island. However, even though Gatsby’s wealth may be commensurate with the likes of Tom Buchanan’s, he is ultimately unable to break into the “distinguished secret society” of those who were born wealthy. His attempt to win Daisy Buchanan, a woman from a well-established family of the American elite, ends in disaster and his death.

This tension between “new money” and “old money” is represented in the book by the contrast between West Egg and East Egg. West Egg is portrayed as a tawdry, brash society that “chafed under the old euphemisms,” full of people who have made their money in an age of unprecedented materialism. East Egg, in contrast, is a refined society populated by America’s “staid nobility,” those who have inherited their wealth and who frown on the rawness of West Egg. In the end, it is East Egg that might be said to triumph: while Gatsby is shot and his garish parties are dispersed, Tom and Daisy are unharmed by the terrible events of the summer.

The Great Gatsby is memorable for the rich symbolism that underpins its story. Throughout the novel, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is a recurrent image that beckons to Gatsby’s sense of ambition. It is a symbol of “the orgastic future” he believes in so intensely, toward which his arms are outstretched when Nick first sees him. It is this “extraordinary gift for hope” that Nick admires so much in Gatsby, his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” Once Daisy is within Gatsby’s reach, however, the “colossal significance” of the green light disappears. In essence, the green light is an unattainable promise, one that Nick understands in universal terms at the end of the novel: a future we never grasp but for which we are always reaching. Nick compares it to the hope the early settlers had in the promise of the New World. Gatsby’s dream fails, then, when he fixates his hope on a real object, Daisy. His once indefinite ambition is thereafter limited to the real world and becomes prey to all of its corruption.

The valley of ashes—an industrial wasteland located between West Egg and Manhattan—serves as a counterpoint to the brilliant future promised by the green light. As a dumping ground for the refuse of nearby factories, it stands as the consequence of America’s postwar economic boom, the ugly truth behind the consumer culture that props up newly rich people like Gatsby. In this valley live men like George Wilson who are “already crumbling.” They are the underclasses that live without hope, all the while bolstering the greed of a thriving economy. Notably, Gatsby does not in the end escape the ash of this economy that built him: it is George Wilson who comes to kill him, described as an “ashen” figure the moment before he shoots Gatsby.

Over the valley of ashes hover the bespectacled eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, which appear on the advertising billboard of an oculist. These eyes almost become a moral conscience in the morally vacuous world of The Great Gatsby ; to George Wilson they are the eyes of God. They are said to “brood” and “[keep] their vigil” over the valley, and they witness some of the most corrupt moments of the novel: Tom and Myrtle’s affair, Myrtle’s death, and the valley itself, full of America’s industrial waste and the toiling poor. However, in the end they are another product of the materialistic culture of the age, set up by Doctor Eckleburg to “fatten his practice.” Behind them is just one more person trying to get rich. Their function as a divine being who watches and judges is thus ultimately null , and the novel is left without a moral anchor.

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The Great Gatsby

F. scott fitzgerald.

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

The Great Gatsby: Introduction

The great gatsby: plot summary, the great gatsby: detailed summary & analysis, the great gatsby: themes, the great gatsby: quotes, the great gatsby: characters, the great gatsby: symbols, the great gatsby: literary devices, the great gatsby: quizzes, the great gatsby: theme wheel, brief biography of f. scott fitzgerald.

Historical Context of The Great Gatsby

Other books related to the great gatsby.

• Full Title: The Great Gatsby
• Where Written: Paris and the US, in 1924
• When Published: 1925
• Literary Period: Modernism
• Genre: Novel
• Setting: Long Island, Queens, and Manhattan, New York in the summer of 1922
• Climax: The showdown between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy
• Point of View: First person

Extra Credit for The Great Gatsby

Puttin' on the Fitz. Fitzgerald spent most of his adult life in debt, often relying on loans from his publisher, and even his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in order to pay the bills. The money he made from his novels could not support the high-flying cosmopolitan life his wife desired, so Fitzgerald turned to more lucrative short story writing for magazines like Esquire. Fitzgerald spent his final three years writing screenplays in Hollywood.

Another Failed Screenwriter. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic and his wife Zelda suffered from serious mental illness. In the final years of their marriage as their debts piled up, Zelda stayed in a series of mental institutions on the East coast while Fitzgerald tried, and largely failed, to make money writing movie scripts in Hollywood.

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The Great Gatsby

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Nick as the Narrator in The Great Gatsby Essay

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Introduction

Nick as an unreliable narrator, works cited.

In the literature, an ‘unreliable narrator’ often symbolizes an individual that the readers cannot fully believe or trust (Murphy 68). The reasons for not believing the narrator may vary. Such narrators could suffer from mental challenges, personal issues, have a personal bias or attachment to another character that is obviously unfair, have an underlying objective, lack intelligence, or be naïve. The audience should not confuse the narrator’s unreliability with satire, sarcasm, or irony. Even though the narrators cannot be taken lightly, it does not imply that their questionable actions are intentional.

As one of the most liked books in the American history, The Great Gatsby continues to ignite controversial thoughts through its many character interpretations and underlying objectives (Lena 16). However, the narrator’s believability stands out as one of the novel’s shortcomings. The novel shows that the only evidence that the reader has on the narrator’s credibility is his word, and this aspect leaves room to question any judgment made about the other characters.

This paper analyzes the unreliable nature of Nick as a narrator in The Great Gatsby. It mostly takes note of the audience’s lack of knowledge about Nick’s ability to keep his promise, his history, the unexplained gaps in time, and his bias support of Gatsby. The readers are left to conclude that Nick is not a reliable narrator. This analysis uses the relationship between Nick (Y element) and Great Gatsby (X text) to bring out the main points in the paper.

The story revolves around a character named Nick Carraway. All the details in the narrative are the collection of Nick’s views on different issues and his perspective, coupled with how he mainly feels as they happen at the time. The story relies on Nick’s presence to show how the events unfolded.

This aspect explains why the story heavily hangs on his perspective of what he believes happened before he ever came to live in the new region. Therefore, his connection with the Gatsby’s story is that he is depended upon to serve as the mouthpiece of the older generation as he metaphorically transcends through time to retell the Great Gatsby tale accurately to the present reader and listeners.

A look at how Nick narrates the story shows that he apparently favors Gatsby. This bias is extreme to the point that he lies in his stories to promote his arguments as opposed to telling the facts as a reliable narrator should do. Reynolds explains that Nick is unreliable as a narrator since he never stays true to his claim of reserving his judgments (7).

In addition, Nick’s unreliability stands out in the way he treats and makes assumptions about other characters. Nick’s unreliability for the great Gatsby story means he can talk from a neutral point of view. For instance, he can openly discuss and correct contemporary events with an underlying Victorian moral sense. The narrator and Gatsby have a unique relationship.

The two individuals seem to care genuinely about each other. However, there are signs that their association is rather complicated. For instance, the narrator overly trusts his friend and prefers him to the other characters. Gatsby likes Nick since, unlike the other characters, he manages to see past the riches and fully supports his friends, romantic dreams, and ideas. On the other hand, Nick likes his friend Gatsby since, unlike the others, he at least seems to have a worthy goal in life.

Nick admirers believe this sole objective makes him stand out from the other characters that he openly terms as materialistic, lazy, and useless.

Nick maintains that he has the right to make personal decisions and judgments, because, as his father allegedly once told him, “not everyone grows up with the privileges he experienced” (Meehan 82). This advice brings out Nick as arrogant and judgmental by believing that he is better than the rest.

He then continues to praise his honesty and his character by claiming that he “is one of the few honest people he knows” (Fitzgerald 1). However, as the novel unfolds all the facts point contrary to this claim. He claims that the other characters are a ‘rotten crowd,’ and even if their value is combined, Gatsby still exceeds them all (Fitzgerald 160).

Such sycophant statements prove that Nick considers Gatsby as a friend, and thus he thinks better of him than the other characters. His description of Daisy and Tom is that they are careless individuals that destroy things and hide back into their carelessness and wealth (Fitzgerald 186). He describes Jordan Baker as a pathological cheat, George Wilson as a spiritless individual, and Mr. McKee as feminine (Lena 36).

One cannot ascertain the truthfulness of Nick’s narration because his past life events are not availed to the audience. Even though his narration gives clues about his past, the details do not add up. At first, he claims that he comes from a prominent family (Fitzgerald 3). However, later he denies the claims and dismisses them as rumors. The fact that Nick manipulates the truth to suit his needs further proves that he is unreliable as a narrator.

The narrator agrees that Gatsby is the only exception to his feelings and reactions and that he symbolizes all that he has unaffected scorn (Fitzgerald 8). He acknowledges that this fact makes it hard even for him to judge Gatsby. Gatsby is excluded from Nick’s judgment because he has an extraordinary gift of hope, and for the narrator, reserving judgment is an issue of indefinite hope (Reynolds 77). In comparison to the other people in the story, the narrator demonstrates acceptance of Gatsby mainly by the way he defines him as an individual and his behaviors.

In the first meeting between Nick and Gatsby, he describes him as a “refined young roughneck whose detailed speech formality slightly borders absurdity” (Fitzgerald 54). Therefore, regardless of whether the narrator’s verdicts are correct or not, one can clearly see that he cannot keep the judgments to himself. The friendship between the two individuals significantly influences Nick’s perception of his friend.

The narrator has always been a good friend of Gatsby. For example, he is aware that his friend is engaged in misconducts, but that does not matter to him, as he goes ahead to pursue Daisy for his friend. He even goes to the extent of concurring with Gatsby’s favor of planning a tea party with the only guests being Daisy and Gatsby (Fitzgerald 88).

As the party planner, Nick excludes Tom from the party without caring how he feels. From the start, his primary objective is to facilitate Gatsby’s happiness. Lena points out that the very view that Nick takes it upon himself to personally arrange his friend’s funeral demonstrates how much he values Gatsby as an ally (17).

The ties that bind Gatsby and Nick are so strong that they make an indomitable alliance. Fitzgerald adds that Gatsby and Nick both share common hate for most of the people they know (172). On the other hand, Reynolds affirms their great friendship by explaining that after Gatsby’s demise, Nick no longer finds any pleasure in where he currently resides, and thus he decides to relocate since there is no point living there without his friend (183).

Throughout the novel, the narrator intentionally ignores Gatsby’s mistakes. He is aware that his friend sells illegal alcohol, even though restrictions are in place. In addition, Gatsby shares a secret business with Mr. Wolfsheim, who is rumored to have some known accomplishments.

By ignoring these overwhelming facts, Nick reserves his judgment against Gatsby because they are friends. In addition, he does not interfere with her cousin’s affair with Gatsby despite knowing that the repercussion of their actions would hurt their families. This aspect further demonstrates the narrator’s willingness to be biased towards Gatsby despite cheating himself that he is a just man.

Apparently, the narrator can overlook Gatsby’s faults and blatantly disapprove of the characters like Jordan Baker cheating during the golf game. During the time that Gatsby and Tom directly disagree, Nick is not angry about Gatsby’s actions, but he is unhappy with the others. The author writes that he plainly told Jordan Baker that he and the other characters bored him (Fitzgerald 149).

If the narrator can downplay the fact that his friend, Gatsby, is a criminal and a murderer and still fully support him, then why could he not do the same for Tom? After all, his friend’s demise is directly not related to Tom’s actions, yet he blames him for everything. He states that he could not bring himself to “like or forgive Tom even though he knew what he did was entirely justified; it was all confused and careless” (Fitzgerald 179). The ability of the narrator to protect his friend extends beyond this mindlessness, and he attempts to cheat the reader to prolong Gatsby’s legacy.

When the two friends meet for the first time, Gatsby tells the narrator that he has the money, after all, his family died (Fitzgerald 65). In the end, the readers discover that Gatsby is involved with bootlegging, but the aspect that Gatsby’s family members died remains defended until his funeral. However, after Gatsby’s death, Nick confesses that his friend never told him that his parents died even though Gatsby explicitly confirmed they were dead (Fitzgerald 165).

In this context, the narrator automatically assumes that since his friend lied about the wealth then he would lie about the death of his family. Therefore, he is making a falsified assumption since Gatsby’s story is partly true; for example, he studied at Oxford. It only leaves the conclusions that point out that Nick is unreliable as a narrator (Wall 20).

One conclusion is that Nick is withholding some information or that he intentionally lies to the reader. However, just like any other human being characterized by weaknesses, Nick is prone to lies, hurt, betrayal, and amnesia, among other human frailties. At one point, when visiting New York for a meeting with Daisy, he imbibes more alcohol than he can handle. In an attempt to save face, he lies that he has only taken alcohol once in his life, and thus this incidence is his second attempt.

Therefore, all that happens at that time is unclear and hard to recall (Egan 16). Nick does not recall much, but what he is sure of is that he wakes up in another man’s bedroom. Now, if his sexual orientation were in question, why would he not tell the reader, Daisy, or Gatsby? Maybe he probably tells his friend, but he is just not telling the reader mainly due to the inconsistency of time in his narrations, such as that night. All he recalls is the ride in the elevator where Mr. McKee invites him to lunch, and he accepts (Kleven 28).

The next detail that Nick provides is that he “stood beside his bed, and he was wearing only his underwear while sitting up between his sheets, holding a great portfolio in his hands…Then he was half asleep in the cold lower level of a train station, looking at the morning newspaper while waiting for the train (Fitzgerald 38). One issue that stems from this description is that Nick could be a homosexual and did not bother to tell the readers.

It only proves that there could be more that he is intentionally excluding. Nick’s sources are another aspect of the narrator that raises questions. The majority of his facts come from interactions with Jordan, Gatsby, or rumors. In addition, his description of Jordan is that of a cheat and a liar, so why should he use or believe anything that she tells him (Egan 8).

On the other hand, Gatsby is a perpetual liar, especially to Nick. From this realization, it suffices to conclude that if Gatsby were alive, he would most likely lie to Nick, because apparently lying is part of his life. In the dinner meeting between Nick and Wolfsheim, Gatsby seems enervated, which implies that perhaps he is trying to conceal something from Nick. The fact that Gatsby can manipulate Nick signifies that he is gullible, and Gatsby is still withholding information from him. Then as a narrator, Nick is unreliable to tell the story.

Nick’s bias support for Gatsby, his lack of certified sources of information, and his overall negative judgment towards others hinder him from being an outstanding narrator. A reliable narrator would never permit emotions to affect how s/he narrates a story. However, Nick is human, everything that he tells is already sieved through his subconscious, and this aspect changes how he and the readers view the narrative (Corrigan 33).

Through the narrator’s many interactions and dealings with Gatsby, their strong relationship shows. Therefore, through this strong bond, the narration of The Great Gatsby becomes substantially biased to favor Gatsby. It mostly portrays events that only exhibit Gatsby’s positive aspects, while ignoring those that show his negative sides (Doe and Epps 19). For the reader to be aware of the narrator’s bias towards Gatsby helps in understanding Gatsby and Nick’s true characters.

In this context, it shows how Nick views and treats those he considers as friends, which in this context is Gatsby. It also demonstrates that once he regards an individual as an ally, Nick remains loyal to a fault despite the person’s many flaws. He can even lie for the sake of benefiting his friends.

Corrigan, Maureen. So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, New York: Little Brown, 2014. Print.

Doe, Jane, and Harold Epps. “The Evil Within Human Nature in the Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, and The Great Gatsby.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 7.2 (2012): 12-37. Print.

Egan, Kelsey. “Film Production Design: Case Study of The Great Gatsby.” Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications 5.1 (2014): 6-17. Print.

Fitzgerald, Scott. The Great Gatsby, London: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.

Kleven, Oskar. The Great Gatsby: A comparative study of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby and the film adaptations between 1974 and 2013, Sweden: Lund University Press, 2014. Print.

Lena, Alberto. “Deceitful Traces of Power: An Analysis of the Decadence of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.” Canadian Review of American Studies 28.1 (1998): 19-42. Print.

Meehan, Adam. “Repetition, Race, and Desire in The Great Gatsby.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.2 (2014): 76-91. Print.

Murphy, Terence. “Defining the reliable narrator: The marked status of first-person fiction.” Journal of Literary Semantics 41.1 (2012): 67-87. Print.

Reynolds, Guy. Introduction to The Great Gatsby, Belmont: Wordsworth, 2001. Print.

Wall, Kathleen. “The Remains of the Day” and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 24.1 (1994): 18-42. Print.

• Short Summary
• Summary (Chapter 1)
• Summary (Chapter 2)
• Summary (Chapter 3)
• Summary (Chapter 4)
• Summary (Chapter 5)
• Summary (Chapter 6)
• Summary (Chapter 7)
• Summary (Chapter 8)
• Summary (Chapter 9)
• Symbolism & Style
• Quotes Explained
• Questions & Answers
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Biography
• Silver & Gold: Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby
• The Dilemmas of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby
• The Great Gatsby
• Daisy Buchanan: “I Did Love Him Once, but I Loved You, Too”
• Gatsby & Jean Valjean
• Literature Studies: "Alas, Poor Ghost" by G. Bennett
• Folk Tale in ‘A Cinderella Story’ by Mark Rosman
• J.D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ - Themes and Insights
• Jack London’s The Call of the Wild
• The Coming of Age in Mississippi: Memoir by Anne Moody
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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The Queering of Nick Carraway

In the middle of a class discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald ’s The Great Gatsby some years ago, a student raised his hand and asked, in essence: What are we supposed to make of the scene where Nick Carraway goes off with the gay guy?

And I said, in essence: Wait, what gay guy?

He pointed me to the scene that closes Chapter II. This is the chapter in which Nick accompanies Tom Buchanan and his mistress, Myrtle, to an apartment Tom keeps in Manhattan. Myrtle invites her sister and some neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. McKee, to join them, and they throw a raucous party that ends with Tom breaking Myrtle’s nose. Amid the blood and the screaming, Mr. McKee awakens from an alcoholic slumber:

Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed. “Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator. “Where?” “Anywhere?” “Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy. “I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching it.” “All right,” I agreed. “I’ll be glad to.” …I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. “Beauty and the Beast…Loneliness…Old Grocery Horse…Brook’n Bridge…” Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune , and waiting for the four o’clock train.

I had, I’m embarrassed to say, never seen that passage before. Except that’s not true. I’d read the book half a dozen times since college, and taught it once, but I had somehow missed the fact that the narrator wanders off in a drunken stupor with a stranger and ends up in his bedroom.

Whether my student knew it or not, he was tapping into a strain of scholarly inquiry into the sexual orientation of Nick Carraway that dates back at least to Keath Fraser ’s 1979 essay “Another Reading of The Great Gatsby.” Fraser ultimately equivocated on the question of Nick’s sexuality, but in 1992, Edward Wasiolek argued in “The Sexual Drama of Nick and Gatsby” that the gay subtext in Gatsby is crystal clear: “I do not know how one can read the scene in McKee’s bedroom in any other way, especially when so many other facts about [Nick’s] behavior support such a conclusion.”

In the decades since, suggestions that maybe, possibly, there’s more to Fitzgerald’s narrator than he’s letting on have given way to ever more self-assured, even faintly indignant, assertions of Nick’s queerness, with titles like The Atlantic’s  2013 article “The Great Gatsby Movie Needed to Be More Gay” or BookRiot’s  2017 piece “Nick Carraway Is Queer and in Love with Jay Gatsby.”

Most queer readings of Gatsby begin with that scene with Mr. McKee and branch out from there to note that Nick’s love interest in the novel, Jordan Baker, is an athlete who carries herself “like a young cadet” and is most alluring to Nick when they play tennis and “a faint mustache of perspiration appear[s] on her upper lip.” When she and Nick break up at the end of the book, Jordan tells him she had thought he was “an honest, straightforward person,” to which he responds, “I’m thirty. I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor”—a line that rings differently if you read Nick as a closeted gay man.

Of course, all of this shapes how we view the relationship between Nick and Gatsby. In a straight reading of the novel, Nick is merely an interested observer who helps facilitate Gatsby’s mad dream to rekindle his love affair with Daisy, now unhappily married to Tom Buchanan. That Gatsby , the one taught for generations in high school and college classrooms, is a classic tale about the American Dream and doomed love and the impossibility of turning back time. In that novel, Nick loves Gatsby, the erstwhile James Gatz of North Dakota, for his capacity to dream Jay Gatsby into being and for his willingness to risk it all for the love of a beautiful woman.

In a queer reading of Gatsby , Nick doesn’t just love Gatsby, he’s in love with him. In some readings, the tragedy is that Gatsby doesn’t love him back. In others, Gatsby is as repressed as Nick, each chasing an unavailable woman to avoid admitting what he truly desires. “Nick chooses Jordan for some of the same reasons Gatsby chose Daisy,” writes Wasiolek in “The Sexual Drama of Nick and Gatsby.” “Daisy is Gatsby’s defense against women, and Jordan is Nick’s against women.”

That last one, I’ll admit, is a touch too Freudian for me, but if Nick were gay and in love with Gatsby it sure would clear up some things—such as what exactly Nick sees in Gatsby , a social-climbing fabulist with gangster friends who moves heaven and earth for a woman Nick plainly sees as a ditz. It would also make sense of Nick’s emotionally sterile affair with Jordan. And, of course, if Nick is queer, his trip to Mr. McKee’s bedroom isn’t merely a mysterious interlude in a canonical book, but a secret key that opens the door onto one of America’s first great gay novels.

So then, is Nick gay? The short answer is we’ll never know. The only person who could say for sure is F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he’s been dead since 1940. But it’s worth noting that when he wrote Gatsby , Fitzgerald was the golden boy of American letters at a time of near-universal homophobia. Had readers picked up even a whiff of gay subtext in Gatsby , he risked losing everything: his career, his marriage, his reputation, his friends. But no one did see it, and, in fact, as Wasiolek notes, among the thousands of essays and critical studies of one of America’s most widely read novels no one noted the gay subtext in the McKee bedroom scene until Fraser wrote about it in 1979.

So, making Nick a closeted gay man makes little emotional or artistic sense unless Fitzgerald was using Nick’s sexuality to explore in a deeply coded way his own guilt and shame over his unspoken desires—a theory that runs into the not inconsiderable hurdle that there is zero evidence that Fitzgerald was attracted to men. Yes, his wife Zelda did once accuse him of being in love with Ernest Hemingway , but at the time their marriage was unraveling and she was months from being hospitalized for schizophrenia. (Zelda also despised Hemingway, whom she reportedly saw as “a pansy with hair on his chest.” Hemingway, for his part, hated Zelda right back, times approximately a million.)

But here’s the thing: If Fitzgerald had wanted to scratch a sexual itch badly enough to make him write coded gay characters into his books, he suffered no shortage of opportunities. For the last decade of his life, he lived apart from Zelda in European resort towns and in Hollywood, where he was surrounded by men living more or less openly gay lives. Yet not one credible story of Fitzgerald having sex with another man has turned up, either in his journals or in the famously gossipy movie colony. Instead, he had a few minor flings with female starlets before settling into stable relationship with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham , who was with him when he died.

But okay, people are complicated. Maybe Fitzgerald had a secret life he was able keep under wraps his entire adult life despite the fact that he was falling-down drunk for much of that time, or perhaps he desired men, but was so disgusted by this need that he never acted upon it. There is, I think, a deeper reason to question a queer reading of The Great Gatsby : It doesn’t sound much like a novel F. Scott Fitzgerald, gay or straight, would write.

None of this, of course, proves that Nick isn’t gay—that can’t be proven one way or the other—but I suspect the queer readings of Nick Carraway say more about the way we read now than they do about Nick or The Great Gatsby . We read with a perpetually queered eye, forever on the hunt for coded language or secret lives in characters. This is not in itself a bad thing. It layers our reading, opening our eyes to stories within stories that we missed before, but it can blind us, too, because once we know the code, we start to think all writers are in on it, when some of them might not be. Just because Fitzgerald wrote a scene that reads to us like a gay tryst doesn’t mean that Fitzgerald was gay and trying to send us a message in a bottle. Similarly, the fact that Nick meets a gay man and doesn’t run screaming doesn’t make Nick gay. Maybe it just means he’s tolerant and curious about people, whether they’re closeted gay men or bootleggers who want to turn back time.

Let’s go back to that scene with Mr. McKee. No writer as attuned to wordplay and symbols as F. Scott Fitzgerald could have written that line about touching the elevator lever before a scene in which two men end up in a bedroom and not meant for a reader to catch the double-entendre. Whatever his sexual persuasion, Fitzgerald wasn’t an idiot.

To us, reading with our queered eye, the double-entendre must be a veiled hint that Nick is gay, but that’s us now when the closeted gay man has become a stock character in film and literature. Fitzgerald’s original readers wouldn’t necessarily have come to the same conclusion. The savvier among them might have picked up that Mr. McKee is gay. It’s McKee, after all, who invites Nick for lunch and gets accused of touching the lever. It’s also McKee who’s in bed in his skivvies while Nick stands, outside the bed, listening to McKee drone on about his photo album.

Of course, Nick does follow McKee from the party and accept his lunch invitation, but that’s Nick’s role in Gatsby : he follows people and agrees to things. Nick’s tolerance, his curiosity about people, isn’t just some minor character quirk. It’s key to Nick’s character and central to Fitzgerald’s narrative strategy. Over and over, Nick meets bizarre, interesting people and reserves judgment until they reveal themselves to him—and us. It’s right there on the first page of the novel, when Nick relates the advice his father gave him about keeping in mind that not everyone has had his advantages. “In consequence,” Nick explains, “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.”

Thus, when Gatsby’s friend, the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, winds up a story about a mob hit by showing off his cufflinks fashioned from the “finest specimens of human molars,” Nick doesn’t back slowly out of the room and call the cops. He looks closer at the mobster’s cufflinks and exclaims, “Well! That’s a very interesting idea.” Later, when Gatsby arranges for Nick to set up a date with Daisy, a married woman Gatsby hasn’t seen since he was a poor boy about to be sent off to war, Nick doesn’t tell Gatsby gently and firmly that he’s out of his mind. No, he calls Daisy to set up the date.

This, to my mind, is what a queer reading of Gatsby misses: Nick’s tolerance, his willingness to reserve judgment about things his world found frightening or wrong. Yes, it’s possible Fitzgerald was using the scene with Mr. McKee to speak in code of his own hidden desires, but more likely it’s a scene in which a straight man in 1920s America meets a closeted gay man—and listens to him. Likewise, maybe Nick’s love for Gatsby is queer, but more likely it’s queer in the nonsexual sense, meaning odd, uncanny. Maybe Nick really is who he says he is: a nice, decent, rather conventional bond salesman from the Midwest who knows he shouldn’t admire Jay Gatsby , but does anyway. Maybe he loves Gatsby, not because he wants to have sex with him, but because he wants to understand him, make sense of his queer and improbable dreams.

Michael Bourne is a staff writer for The Millions and a contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Salon, and The Economist. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, December, The Southampton Review, and The Cortland Review. His debut novel, Blithedale Canyon, is due out from Regal House in June, 2022

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — The Great Gatsby

Essays on The Great Gatsby

The great gatsby essay topic examples.

Whether you want to analyze the American Dream, compare and contrast characters, vividly describe settings and characters, persuade readers with your viewpoints, or share personal experiences related to the story, these essay ideas provide a diverse perspective on the themes and complexities within the book.

Argumentative Essays

Argumentative essays require you to analyze and present arguments related to the novel. Here are some topic examples:

• 1. Argue whether the American Dream is achievable or illusory, as depicted in The Great Gatsby .
• 2. Analyze the moral ambiguity of Jay Gatsby and the consequences of his relentless pursuit of the American Dream.

Example Introduction Paragraph for an Argumentative Essay: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a tale of ambition, decadence, and the elusive American Dream. This essay delves into the complex theme of the American Dream, exploring whether it remains attainable or has transformed into a tantalizing illusion, luring individuals like Jay Gatsby into its enigmatic embrace.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for an Argumentative Essay: In conclusion, the analysis of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby invites us to reevaluate our perceptions of success and fulfillment. As we contemplate the fate of Jay Gatsby and the characters entangled in his world, we are challenged to define our own version of the American Dream and the sacrifices it may entail.

Compare and Contrast Essays

Compare and contrast essays enable you to examine similarities and differences within the novel or between it and other literary works. Consider these topics:

• 1. Compare and contrast the characters of Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, exploring their contrasting worldviews and motivations.
• 2. Analyze the similarities and differences between the portrayal of the Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises .

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Essay: The characters and settings in The Great Gatsby and other literary works offer a rich tapestry for comparison and contrast. This essay embarks on a journey to compare and contrast the enigmatic Jay Gatsby and the brash Tom Buchanan, delving into their contrasting values, aspirations, and roles within the novel.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Essay: In conclusion, the comparison and contrast of Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan illuminate the divergent paths individuals can take in pursuit of their desires. As we consider the consequences of their choices, we are prompted to reflect on the complexities of ambition and morality.

Descriptive Essays

Descriptive essays allow you to vividly depict settings, characters, or events within the novel. Here are some topic ideas:

• 1. Describe the opulent parties at Gatsby's mansion, emphasizing the decadence and extravagance of the Jazz Age.
• 2. Paint a detailed portrait of Daisy Buchanan, focusing on her beauty, charm, and the allure she holds for Gatsby.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Descriptive Essay: The Great Gatsby immerses readers in the lavish world of the Roaring Twenties. This essay embarks on a descriptive exploration of the extravagant parties at Gatsby's mansion, capturing the opulence and hedonism of the era, as well as the illusions they create.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Descriptive Essay: In conclusion, the descriptive portrayal of Gatsby's parties serves as a vivid snapshot of the Jazz Age's excesses and the fleeting nature of indulgence. Through this exploration, we are reminded of the allure and transience of the materialistic pursuits that captivated the characters of the novel.

Persuasive Essays

Persuasive essays involve arguing a point of view related to the novel. Consider these persuasive topics:

• 1. Persuade your readers that Nick Carraway is the moral compass of the story, serving as the voice of reason and morality.
• 2. Argue for or against the idea that Gatsby's love for Daisy is genuine and selfless, despite his questionable methods.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Persuasive Essay: The Great Gatsby presents a tapestry of characters with complex moral dilemmas. This persuasive essay asserts that Nick Carraway emerges as the moral compass of the story, guiding readers through the labyrinth of decadence and disillusionment in the Jazz Age.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Persuasive Essay: In conclusion, the persuasive argument regarding Nick Carraway's role as the moral compass underscores the importance of ethical navigation in a world characterized by excess and moral ambiguity. As we reflect on his influence, we are compelled to consider the enduring value of integrity and virtue.

Narrative Essays

Narrative essays offer you the opportunity to tell a story or share personal experiences related to the themes of the novel. Explore these narrative essay topics:

• 1. Narrate a personal experience where you encountered the allure of materialism and extravagance, similar to the characters in The Great Gatsby .
• 2. Imagine yourself as a character in the Jazz Age and recount your interactions with Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Narrative Essay: The themes of The Great Gatsby resonate with the allure of a bygone era. This narrative essay delves into a personal encounter with the seductive pull of materialism and extravagance, drawing parallels to the characters' experiences in the novel.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Narrative Essay: In conclusion, the narrative of my personal encounter with the allure of materialism reminds us of the timeless nature of the themes in The Great Gatsby . As we navigate our own desires and ambitions, we are encouraged to contemplate the balance between aspiration and morality.

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Ambition and Control: The Complex Character of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

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The Portrayal of Female Characters in F.s. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

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April 10, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Novel; Fiction, Tragedy

Jay Gatsby , Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson, Jordan Baker, Meyer Wolfsheim, George B. Wilson, Trimalchio, Mr. Gatz

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "The Great Gatsby" with multiple motivations in mind. Firstly, he sought to critique the materialistic excesses and moral decay of the Roaring Twenties, a period of post-World War I prosperity. Fitzgerald aimed to expose the disillusionment and hollowness behind the glittering facade of the American Dream. Additionally, he drew inspiration from his own experiences and observations of the wealthy elite and their decadent lifestyles. Through the character of Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald explored themes of unrequited love, longing, and the pursuit of an unattainable ideal. Ultimately, Fitzgerald's intent was to capture the essence of an era and offer a profound commentary on the human condition.

The story revolves around Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a married woman with whom he had a romantic past. Narrated by Nick Carraway, a young man from the Midwest, the novel delves into the opulent and extravagant lives of the wealthy elite in Long Island. As Gatsby throws lavish parties in the hope of rekindling his relationship with Daisy, the narrative explores themes of love, wealth, illusion, and the disillusionment that comes with the pursuit of the American Dream.

The American Dream , decadence, idealism, resistance to changes, social excess, caution.

The influence of "The Great Gatsby" extends far beyond its initial publication in 1925. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel has become a literary classic, revered for its exploration of themes such as wealth, love, and the elusive American Dream. It remains relevant due to its timeless portrayal of human desires, societal decadence, and the consequences of relentless pursuit. The book's vivid characters and atmospheric prose have inspired countless writers and artists, shaping the landscape of American literature. With its commentary on the dark underbelly of the Jazz Age, "The Great Gatsby" continues to captivate readers, serving as a cautionary tale and a poignant reflection of the human condition.

1. During F. Scott Fitzgerald's lifetime, approximately 25,000 copies of the book were sold. However, since then, it has gained immense popularity, selling over 25 million copies and establishing itself as one of the most renowned American novels. 2. The Great Gatsby did not have its original title as the author considered various options, ranging from "Under the Red, White and Blue" to "The High-Bouncing Lover." These alternative titles were potentially revealing too much about the content prematurely. 3. In 1926, just a year after its publication, the book was adapted into a film, demonstrating its quick transition from page to screen. 4. Fitzgerald's cause of death is believed to have been tuberculosis rather than a heart attack. Sadly, he passed away at the age of 44. 5. The price of this famous novel at the time of its publication in 1925 was $2, representing its value in that era. 6. The Great Gatsby did not immediately receive critical acclaim upon release. However, it has since garnered recognition and praise, becoming a significant literary work.

"The Great Gatsby" has made a significant impact on various forms of media, captivating audiences across generations. The novel has been adapted into several films, with notable versions including the 1974 adaptation starring Robert Redford and the 2013 adaptation featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. These cinematic interpretations have brought the story to life visually, further immersing audiences in the opulent world of Jay Gatsby. Additionally, the novel has been referenced and alluded to in countless songs, television shows, and even video games, solidifying its cultural significance. Its themes of love, wealth, and the pursuit of the American Dream continue to resonate and inspire creative works in popular culture.

“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 any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.’” “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.” “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.” “I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

Studying "The Great Gatsby" holds great importance due to its enduring relevance and literary significance. The novel offers profound insights into themes such as wealth, love, social class, and the corruption of the American Dream. Its exploration of the Jazz Age exposes the allure and emptiness of a materialistic society, making it a compelling study of human desires and societal decay. F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterful prose and symbolic imagery provide rich material for analyzing character development, narrative techniques, and social commentary. Moreover, delving into the novel's historical context allows for a deeper understanding of the cultural and societal shifts of the 1920s.

The inclusion of "The Great Gatsby" as an essay topic for college students stems from its exploration of themes like the American Dream, the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth, and the destructive allure of corruption. The character of Gatsby embodies the American spirit and can be paralleled to contemporary individuals fixated on materialism and fame as measures of romantic success. Furthermore, this literary masterpiece holds a significant place in American literature, as F. Scott Fitzgerald skillfully weaves socio-cultural elements into each sentence, providing a timeless portrayal of American life that resonates across generations. The choice to analyze and write about "The Great Gatsby" allows students to delve into these thought-provoking themes and examine their relevance to society.

1. Stallman, R. W. (1955). Conrad and The Great Gatsby. Twentieth Century Literature, 1(1), 5–12. (https://doi.org/10.2307/441023) 2. John Jerrim, Lindsey Macmillan, (2015). Income Inequality, Intergenerational Mobility, and the Great Gatsby Curve: Is Education the Key?, Social Forces, Volume 94, Issue 2. (https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/94/2/505/2583794) 3. Robert C. Hauhart (2013) Religious Language and Symbolism in The Great Gatsby’s Valley of Ashes, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 26:3 (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0895769X.2013.798233) 4. Burnam, T. (1952). The Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg: A Re-Examination of “The Great Gatsby.” College English, 14(1), 7–12. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/371821) 5. Tom Phillips (2018) Passing for White in THE GREAT GATSBY: A Spectroscopic Analysis of Jordan Baker, The Explicator, 76:3. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00144940.2018.1489769?scroll=top&needAccess=true&role=tab) 6. Matterson, S. (1990). The Great Gatsby and Social Class. In: The Great Gatsby. The Critics Debate. Palgrave, London. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-20768-8_9) 7. Licence, A. (2008). Jay Gatsby: martyr of a materialistic society: Amy Licence considers religious elements in The Great Gatsby. The English Review, 18(3), 24+. (https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA173676222&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=09558950&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E5a84816e) 8. Khodamoradpour, Marjan and Anushiravani, Alireza, (2017) Playing the Old Tunes: A Fiskean Analysis of Baz Luhrmann's 2013 Cinematic Adaptation of the Great Gatsby. International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Volume 71. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3020752) 9. Anderson, H. (1968). THE RICH BUNCH IN" THE GREAT GATSBY". Southern Quarterly, 6(2), 163. (https://www.proquest.com/openview/6a9e704a476d873aada2d2529821b95a/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2029886)

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