Views on the role of Nick as a narrator in the Great Gatsby have varied greatly. How do the views of Arthur Mizener and Gary J. Scrimgeour relate to your own view of Nick’s function in the novel?

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Views on the role of Nick as a narrator in the Great Gatsby have varied greatly. How do the views of Arthur Mizener and Gary J. Scrimgeour relate to your own view of Nick’s function in the novel?

Published in 1925, and written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Great Gatsby’ is a brilliant and scathing illustration of life among the new rich during the 1920s; people who had recently amassed a great deal of wealth but had no corresponding social connections, or a sense of morality. Nick Carraway is the narrator of the novel; he rents a house on Long Island next door to Jay Gatsby, the title character. Gatsby is in love with Nick's cousin Daisy, who is married to an obnoxious man she does not really love, and he has no strong feelings towards her either. Her and his extramarital affairs are set against the background of the extravagant parties that Gatsby is famous for throwing, while Nick struggles to reconcile his attraction to a lavish lifestyle with his feeling that a moral grounding is missing. The writing style throughout ‘The Great Gatsby’ is terse and the book at times is depressing, with an overall message of hope and the American dream, discouraging.

   The story is told through the eyes of an active, biased, participant. Nick Carraway has a special place in this novel and has many functions. He is not just one character among several, it is through his eyes and ears that we form our opinions of the other characters. Nick is both within, yet outside the occurrence of events as he is friends with Gatsby and related to Daisy, but is still not involved fully in all that occurs, even though somebody else often tells him about it. Often, readers of this novel confuse Nick's stance towards those characters and the world he describes with those of F. Scott Fitzgerald's because the fictional world Fitzgerald has created closely resembles the world he himself experienced. But not every narrator is the voice of the author. In order for this story to be convincing, we must trust the narrator. We take on his perspective, if not totally, then substantially.    

    We never get to know all the characters at once. As we get to know characters described by an omniscient novelist, we learn about them in bits and pieces over a period of time. Consequently, Fitzgerald reasoned, someone like Gatsby would be much more understandable and sympathetic if presented through the eyes of a character the reader identified with. Rather than imposing himself between the action and us, Nick brings us closer to the action by forcing us to experience events as though we were Nick. The ‘I’ of the novel becomes ourselves, and we find ourselves, like Nick, wondering who Gatsby is, why he gives these huge parties, and what his past and background may be. By writing from Nick's point of view, Fitzgerald is able to make Gatsby more realistic than he could have by presenting Gatsby through the eyes of an omniscient narrator.  He is also able to make Gatsby a more sympathetic character because of Nick's decision to become Gatsby's friend. We want to find out more about Gatsby because Nick does. We care about Gatsby because Nick does. We are angry that no one comes to Gatsby's funeral because Nick is. The use of the first person point of view gives not only the character of Gatsby but also the whole novel a greater air of realism. The story becomes more believable to the reader as Nick and Gatsby have a friendship. We believe these parties really happened because a real person named Nick Carraway is reporting what he saw. When Nick writes down the names of the people who came to Gatsby's parties on a Long Island Railroad timetable, we believe that these people actually came to Gatsby's parties.

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    Nick is careful throughout the novel never to tell us things that he could not have known. If he was not present at a particular occasion, he gets the information from someone who was- from Jordan Baker, for example, who tells him about Gatsby's courtship of Daisy in Louisville; or from the Greek, Michaelis, who tells him about the death of Myrtle Wilson. Sometimes Nick summarizes what others tell him, and sometimes he uses their words, but he never tells us something he could never know. This is one of the reasons the novel is so convincing. It ...

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