In The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway is not a reliable narrator. With reference to appropriately selected parts of the novel, and relevant external contextual material on narrators, give your response to the above view.

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In The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway is not a reliable narrator. With reference to appropriately selected parts of the novel, and relevant external contextual material on narrators, give your response to the above view.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s main innovation was to introduce a first person narrator, Nick Carraway, whose consciousness filters the story’s events. A narrator can be defined as a person who narrates something, especially a character who recounts the events of a novel or narrative poem. The concept of an unreliable narrator was first introduced by Wayne C. Booth, who defined an unreliable narrator as one whose credibility has been seriously compromised. Nick Carraway would certainly fit this description for many reasons. In examining why this is the case, a good place to start is how modernism influenced Fitzgerald’s choice of narrator.

Modernist novels often experiment with narrative structures, using methods such as an unreliable narrator, disrupted chronology and fragmentation of narrative. The Great Gatsby contains all of these elements, especially the unreliable narrator. In the Victorian tradition that preceded the Modernist movement, a narrator was all-knowing, all-seeing, and often pronounced judgment of some kind in a story. Modernism makes a clear break from this, as is exemplified in The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway speaks of viewing life through, “a single window.” This points out very clearly to the reader that the story presented in these pages is just one view from one person. The 'single window' we are about to look through is Nick's mind, which suggests that his narration may be unreliable.

Fitzgerald is careful to present Nick as ordinary and flawed to further dispel the Victorian tendency to bestow omniscience upon a narrator, whose presentation begins within the very first few paragraphs of the story. Nick boldly states of himself, “I'm inclined to reserve all judgments.” Not long after that, Nick goes on to use words such as ”arrogant,” “supercilious,” and “cruel” to describe his cousin's husband Tom, thus clearly passing (and expressing!) judgment. If Nick is going to tell us something about himself and then proceed to do just what he said he wouldn't, it stands to reason that we are meant to receive the things he tells us with a proverbial grain of salt, always remembering we are looking through only one window. Throughout the novel, we see things only as Nick sees them, hear only as Nick hears, and we understand things only in the way Nick understands them. Making use of an imperfect and limited narrator helps Fitzgerald to express another foundational idea of Modernism - that reality and truth are relative and dependent upon perception. This proves that Nick is an unreliable narrator.

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Further support for the idea that Nick is an unreliable narrator can be found when we consider that Fitzgerald uses what is called a moderated first person viewpoint. This means that although his narration is first person, it is partially based on accounts that have been given to him by others. Nick is not trustworthy, nor fully reliable: he oscillates with regards to details. Whenever Nick cannot obtain a first-hand version of facts, he does not hesitate to quote other sources. For instance, Gatsby’s love affair is told by Jordan Baker: “One October day in nineteen-seventeen—— (said Jordan Baker that ...

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