The Gatsby Reader: Part One - The Narratorship Of Nick Carraway

Ø  Mr. McKee is feminine

Whether his judgments are accurate does not matter. It simply manifests his basic dishonesty because he continually practices differently than he preaches.

Most of his judgments have to do with Gatsby himself. These are judgments that swing wildly from one end of the continuum to the other regarding approval and disapproval.[ii]

Ø  Gatsby “represented everything for which I had an unaffected scorn” (7)

Ø  “There was something gorgeous about him” (7)

Ø  “Gatsby turned out all right in the end” (7)

Ø  “An elegant young rough neck” (53)

Ø  “I suspected he was pulling my leg” (70)

Ø  “He was running down like an overwound clock” (97)

Ø  “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together” (162)

Ø  “I disapproved of him from beginning to end” (162)

Nick’s lies begin even before we get to any other characters, but with his relations to fellow Yalemen while in school, and particularly as it relates to his false claim to reserve judgments. Because he was sought for council Nick becomes the “victim of not a few veteran bores” (5). He concludes this section by observing that “a sense of fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth” (6). These are both the kinds of judgments he asserts never to have made.

When dealing with these bores at college, Nick confesses that he “frequently … feigned sleep, preoccupations or a hostile levity” (5). To pretend to be asleep, busy or irritated is dishonest. In an interesting confession, Fitzgerald gives a clue to Nick’s true nature. Speaking of other men, Nick says, “the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred with obvious suppressions” (6). Nick is still a young man, and so with this, Fitzgerald is cluing us in on Nick’s intimate revelation, which is his role as narrator. His story is plagiaristic and marred with obvious suppressions. In other words, Nick is clearly a liar, particularly as the narrator of The Great Gatsby.

This begins with the intimate revelation of his own background. He says, “My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in the middle-western town for three generations” (7). Despite this claim, his father can only afford to support him for one year (7). And when the Buchanans ask Nick about the rumor of his engagement, he asserts that he is too poor to marry (24).

He notes that his family claims Scottish nobility, but the reality is that his grandfather’s brother, the one responsible for his family line, immigrated here in 1851 and sent a substitute to the Civil War (7). Simply put, immigrants aren’t noble, or they’d remain in the old country. And as Nick is supposed to look like this ancestor, he acts like him as well by sending a substitute tale in place of the truth.

The family history is built on dishonesty. During that disconcerting ride with Gatsby to the Manhattan for lunch, Gatsby claims to have gone to Oxford with a young man in a photo who is now the Earl of Doncaster (71). This is a noble title that also belongs to the Duke of Buccleuch, the alleged ancestor of Nick. Since so much of this conversation is false, which we shall soon discover, it is just as likely that this is false, and even inserted merely in Nick’s retelling.

When confronted with Nick’s basic untruthfulness, some may recall that Nick says about himself, “I am one of the few honest people I have known” (64). Nick Carraway insisting he is honest is like Quinten Compson claiming that he does not hate the South. You an almost bank on the opposite being true.