Nick Carraway Character Analysis

Within F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby the narrator, Nick Carraway, is an intriguing character because he is immersed in the story, but still takes the ancillary role. Within the opening few pages he sets himself up to be a perfect narrator who is observant and well-suited for the job of the narrator. By being observant he sets up this façade of being a perfect and reliable narrator. Nevertheless, through the language that Fitzgerald employs there is cause to state that he is in fact non-reliable and the first few pages solidify this claim. Therefore, in this essay there will be a focus on the fact that although Carraway is an observant person, he may not be reliable.

Carraway essentially sets himself up to be the perfect narrator when …show more content…
Within his place in society he would have been in a position of lower status, but he still judges the people around him. Therefore, although he represents as being ‘inclined to reserve all judgement’, he has in a matter of fact represented his feeble and weak nature by instantly going against what was stated. The phrase, ‘reserve all judgement’, is repeated twice within the second paragraph, once at the beginning and the end. The reason Fitzgerald did this is because he wants the reader to question whether he is able to reserve all judgement or whether it is a ploy to make himself feel less vulnerable. It is apparent that he had an inability to think for himself as the first piece of dialogue was from his father; “whenever you feel like …show more content…
When describing (judging) Gatsby he utilises many techniques to elicit this idea; “there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away”; by utilising the adjective ‘gorgeous’ he makes the audience believe he has some weird fascination with Gatsby, there is no prior mention, but he still manages to write about how incredible he is; by going on to parallel him with a seismograph, Carraway is representing that Gatsby has this acute sense for human emotions, something any normal man would lack. By stating prior in the text that he can ‘reserve all judgements’ then going on to state this, he has brought to light just how unreliable he is. The narrative style, although littered with a strong vocabulary, lacks structure; the same can be said about Carraway’s life. It is convoluted and lacks any strong direction, one minute he will be talking about judgements and the next he will talking about Gatsby. This, a lot of the time is shielded by his verbose language possibly in an attempt to create this façade that would allow him to assume a different persona. This conveys him as a character who is highly