Nick carraway
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Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: Nick Carraway as a Necessary Narrator
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald critiques the disillusionment of the
American Dream by contrasting the corruption of those who adopt a
superficial lifestyle with the honesty of Nick Carraway. As Carraway
familiarizes himself with the lives of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker
and Jay Gatsby, he realizes the false seductiveness of the New York
lifestyle and regains respect for the Midwest he left behind. Fitzgerald
needs an objective narrator to convey and prove this criticism, and uses
Carraway not only as the point of view character, but also as a counter
example to the immorality and dishonesty Carraway finds in New York.
Fitzgerald must to construct this narrator as reliable. Due to the
nature of the novel, the reader would not believe the story if it were told
from the perspective of any other character. Fitzgerald cannot expect the
reader to believe what the immoral and careless characters have to say, and
he spends so much time establishing them as such. Thus, Carraway is deemed
narrator and the reader trusts him.
As the practical character in the novel, Carraway is not rash; he is
not swayed by the greed and alcohol as some other members of East and West
Egg society are. He proclaims, "I have been drunk just twice in my life"
(33). Fitzgerald constructs Carraway as a follower, not a man of action...