Explain the importance of Nick Carraway as a narrator in, "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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Explain the importance of Nick Carraway as a narrator in, “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “For the majority of creative people, life is a pretty mean trick.”   Jay Gatsby is, without a doubt, a creative character.  His life was a, “mean trick.”  He spent his life longing for the unreachable and was killed as a result. Nick Carraway’s first-person viewpoint, allows the reader, to participate in his sense of discovery as the narrative takes on meaning at various levels of abstraction in such a way that the reader and Nick are linked in thought from the beginning of the book.  On the most superficial level, Nick becomes a logical choice as narrator. His physical proximity to the main characters and his trustworthiness situate him ideally to serve as a confidant on several fronts, a character who knows details of the story from many points of view and observe much of the action firsthand. Nick keeps detached from the rest of the characters in “The Great Gatsby” because he has dissimilar views.  He is used by Fitzgerald to subtly voice his own opinions.      

Nick and Gatsby are the only characters that take part in the First World War.  Nick says, at the beginning of the novel that he wanted, “the whole world to be in uniform”.  By moving east Nick is trying to escape his past.  Nick uses the Great War as a backdrop throughout the book as a way stressing that you can never truelly escape your past or your roots.  This is personified in Gatsby with his pseudo European mannerisms.  The romanticised view of Europe is evident within the novel.  Fitzgerald notes that Daisy and Tom “spent a year in France for no particular reason.”   Nick puts a spin on this quotation by using a mocking tone.  His distain towards Tom and Daisy’s society prevents the reader from becoming entangled in the glamour of their lifestyle as well as adding an ominous undertone to the book.      

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Nick takes the role of a storyteller early on.  He is not objective in his narration and comes from a coloured perspective.  Nick, as an observer allows Fitzgerald to pursue his interest in vision.  The Valley of ashes, "a fantastic farm ……….ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke”, recalls the moral wilderness of T.S. Eliot's modernist poem, "The Waste Land" and of Gatsby’s world where God has been replaced by signs of American materialism. It is in the valley of the ashes where Tom has his affair with Myrtle, where Daisy kills Myrtle with Gatsby's car, ...

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