How Nick Carraway Shapes the Way We Read The Great Gatsby

Nick Carraway spends part of his first evening at Gatsby’s party looking for his host, only to discover he’s already talking to him. The man whose guests trade rumors about him turns out to be a fellow veteran Nick has been chatting with at a table. It’s a funny moment, and it also shows how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel works. By the time Gatsby introduces himself, we’ve already had time to imagine someone else.

Nick shapes The Great Gatsby by deciding when we hear a rumor, when we learn what Gatsby told him, and when we get his own interpretation. Those choices matter because he’s remembering a summer whose outcome he already knows. The Nick who attends the party and the Nick who tells us about it are looking at the same man with very different information.

Spoilers for the novel follow.

Nick makes an exception for Gatsby before we meet him

Nick opens with his father’s advice to remember the advantages he’s had before criticizing anyone. He presents his willingness to reserve judgment as one reason people tell him things. Within the same chapter, though, he tells us Gatsby was the exception to the disgust he felt after coming home from the East.

That exception is worth noticing. Before Nick sees Gatsby reaching toward the green light, he’s already asked us to give this stranger a little more room than everyone else. The question to carry into the rest of the novel is what Gatsby does to earn that sympathy and how much of it comes from the way Nick tells his story.

Gatsby’s party gives us rumors. Chapter 6 gives us a reason to revisit them.

At the party in Chapter 3, guests speculate that Gatsby killed a man or was a German spy. Nick then meets someone whose manner seems surprisingly approachable. Gatsby’s smile makes him feel understood, and that personal impression has to compete with everything he’s just heard.

In Chapter 6, Nick finally tells us about James Gatz and Dan Cody. He also says Gatsby told him this part of his history much later than the point at which he’s chosen to include it. For a moment, we can see Nick arranging the material. By placing the backstory here, he gives us time to live with the gossip and then asks us to reconsider it in light of the person Gatsby made himself into.

Daisy gets to speak, but Nick decides what her words mean

At the Plaza Hotel in Chapter 7, Gatsby wants Daisy to say she never loved Tom. She eventually tells him she loved Tom once and loved Gatsby too. That admission is one of the clearest moments in which Daisy’s account of her past exceeds the part Gatsby has written for her.

Later, Nick looks through a window and sees Tom and Daisy sitting together over cold fried chicken. He senses an intimacy between them and thinks they look as though they’re conspiring. He can see them, but he can’t hear what they’re saying. Put the two scenes side by side and you can see how much of the novel depends on the difference between what a character says aloud and what Nick makes of a gesture through glass.

Nick has a stake in these scenes. He arranged the reunion between Gatsby and Daisy at his own house. By the time he’s outside the Buchanans’ window, he’s had a hand in the story he’s trying to understand.

Is Nick Carraway an unreliable narrator?

Nick is selective and personally invested, and he sometimes goes beyond what he can verify. In Chapter 8, he imagines what Gatsby might have felt near the end of his life. In Chapter 9, he describes the Buchanans’ carelessness with the certainty of someone who has reached a verdict. Reading him closely means noticing the difference between what he witnessed, what someone told him, and what he supplies himself.

The ending draws its power from that third kind of storytelling. Nick first sees the green light as a small point across the water. By the last page, he’s turned Gatsby’s longing into a meditation on the future and the pull of the past. The movement from Gatsby to “we” is Nick’s final choice as a narrator. He’s spent the novel deciding how close we can get to Gatsby. In the final sentence, he asks us to recognize something of ourselves in him.

Read or revisit the novel

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Pick up the Scribner paperback of The Great Gatsby, or read Fitzgerald’s novel free at Project Gutenberg.

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