An Unreliable Narrator In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nick Carraway: An Unreliable Narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Judging someone’s character is part of determining if they are trustworthy. This is what readers have to do with first person narrators, they have to look carefully at the narrator and decide if they can trust what the narrator is saying. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the narrator Nick Carraway is unreliable because he is trying to deceive readers by leaving out details, contradicting himself, and knowingly having a bias and acting on that bias. Nick discloses several details about himself that is the foundation of his reliability in the novel. Nick reveals that he is not judgmental, “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments.” (Fitzgerald 1). This means that Nick is expected to not judge people throughout the novel. Nick also says he is trustworthy, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” (59). This is significant because readers will now see Nick as one of the only trustworthy and reliable characters in the novel. Nick has now presented himself as a nonjudgmental, reliable narrator. That description of his character is challenged when he tells us that in college, people used to confide in him, which adds to the notion that people trusted him. He used to pretend he was sleeping or that he was busy. These …show more content…
This makes him unreliable because he does not present characters for who they really are. Nick discloses he enjoys being close to millionaires, “the consoling proximity of millionaires.” (5). This passage is significant because it shows that he has a bias for millionaires and that leads him to not be as critical of them. With this bias, his description of characters is obscured. For example, Nick likes Jay Gatsby more than anyone else in the novel. Gatsby is also a millionaire and when he introduces him, he describes his