How does Fitzgerald tell the story in Chapter 1?
Chapter 1 is successful in portraying that there is a ‘first person narrator’ who is a participant and an observer in the novel. The narrator serves to give an insight into the story, and therefore ultimately, we create our own opinion of him. Through the grammatically-complex sentences in the first page such as “when I came back from east last autumn…”, we establish the idea that he is giving an account retrospectively, therefore highlighting that the narrator is perhaps unreliable. This is effectively portrayed as Nick perhaps followed his fathers advice of “reserving all judgements”, because he’s had “advantages” other people haven’t had. Perhaps this advantage is in the form of cognitively thinking he is better than “normal people”, therefore highlighting that his retrospective account may be flawed.
The idea that this is a 20th century novel reflects on the form of this novel being a ‘novel about writing a novel’. Writing in one style can’t reflect Fitzgerald creative ability, so he uses Romanticism to express his literary creativity. The idea that Romanticism was choosing feeling over reason and choosing beauty and art over technology is challenged. He uses technological imagery to evoke Romantic perceptions and perspectives when describing Gatsby such as Nick thinking is he “related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes”. He combines the Romantic word ‘gorgeous’ with the idea of technology to effectively portray to us that he is a creative writer. This helps aid the ‘love’ story. Nick is highly ambivalent towards Gatsby as he shows he has “an unaffected scorn” for him. This ambivalence frustrates us but makes the reader want to read on, as we discover later in the novel how this ambivalence is merely destructive (Nick implicitly knowing that Daisy killed Myrtle, yet he doesn’t say anything).
