Great Gatsby :: essays papers

Great Gatsby In, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the story is brought to us through a "flawed" narrator, Nick Carraway. It is through his eyes and ears that we form our opinions of the other characters. This makes the audience blind to any discrimination or bias he might have towards the other characters; so Fitzgerald knowingly tries to establish Nick as a trust worthy source. This is important because our only descriptions of Gatsby’s character come from Nick. In The Great Gatsby, Nick goes to some length to establish his credibility, including his moral integrity, in telling this story about this "great" man called Gatsby. He begins with a reflection on his own upbringing, quoting his father's words about Nick's "advantages" which we could assume were material but, he soon makes clear, were moral advantages. Nick wants the reader to know that his upbringing gave him the moral foundation with which to withstand and pass judgment on an immoral world, such as the one he has observed in his stay in the East (New York). He says, rather pompously, that as a consequence of such an upbringing, he is "inclined to reserve all judgments" about other people, but then goes on to say that such "tolerance... has a limit.† This is the first sign that we can trust this narrator to give us an even-handed insight to the story that is about to unfold, but we later learn that he neither reserves all judgments nor does his tolerance reach its limit. He admits early into the story, for example, that he makes an exception of judging Gatsby, for whom he is prepared to suspend both the moral code of his upbringing and the limit of tolerance, because Gatsby had an "extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness." This inspired him to a level of friendship and loyalty that Nick seems unprepared to extend towards others in the novel. For example, Nick overlooks the moral failures of Gatsby's bootlegging, his association with speakeasies, and his liaison with Meyer Wolfsheim yet, he is contemptuous of Jordan Baker for cheating in a mere golf game. And though he says that he's prepared to forgive this sort of behavior in a woman: "It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame too deeply... I was casually sorry, and then I forgot," it seems that he cannot accept her for being "incurably dishonest", and then says that his one "cardinal virtue" is that he's "one of the few honest people" he has ever known .