On The Great Gatsby Scott Fitzgerald presents a study of wealth and ambition through the prism of pathetic characters for whom one can hardly find socially redeeming values.
What The Great Gatsby portrays is the sordid tale of a small group of weak characters involved in cheating, adultery, deception, and debauchery. The lavish Jazz-age parties that Jay Gatsby throws to win back Daisy Buchanan (his lost illusions and perfidious lover) are anything but wild bacchanalia.
When one thinks of the rest of the nation, we can breathe a sigh of relief to see that the rest of Americans are engaged in productive enterprises, in rebuilding the nation after the waste of resources that was the First World War. The sordidness of the story applies, almost entirely, to that small group of marginal, misguided, and unsavory characters. It is not a book about America’s spiritual dismemberment (as the book has been interpreted by many to be) that came in 1927 with the Great Depression.
While in Ernest Hemingway’s tale “The Killers” we experience the objective voice of a disinterested storyteller, in the Great Gatsby we are deceived by the relentless prejudices of Nick Carraway, a charming character – and storyteller – who not only has an interesting story to tell, but also has an agenda. Your schedule is a long list of things to “clean”, events to smooth out, and a guilty conscience to clean. In a vein similar to the Confessions written by Augustine, Rousseau, and Ben Franklin, Nick exacerbates other people’s crimes and misdeeds while obscuring and minimizing his own.
From the beginning of the narrative, Nick Carraway makes it clear that the story he is about to tell is a very personal story, and that he is going to be the protagonist. Then, with these words: “In my youngest and most vulnerable years …” he begins to tell the story of himself and of the young people who come of age, people who today are in the middle of finding their own. identity, groping. goals and a more secure future. It is a generational story in which the ambitious Dough Boys, who have returned from fighting in a world war, compete for a position in the sun, competing for a place not in the tedium of poverty or disenchantment, but for a part of the splendor in wealth and love.
Although Nick makes a calculated decision to come to the East to pursue a career on Wall Street, his heart moves him in a different direction; his heart is in literature, and he lets us know what his intentions are: “I was quite literary in college – one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News – and now I was going to bring back all such things in my life and to once again be the most limited of all specialists, the ‘complete man’ “(GG, 4).
Having attended Yale University, he is justified in calling himself a ‘complete man’ who is fully equipped with the experience, education and talent to become a writer, a man of letters.
At the beginning of the narration, he even indulges the author at even knowing the title of his book: “Only Gatsby, the man who gives this book his name, was exempt from my reaction.” (GG, 2). He also participates in moments of metanarration. When in the second book of Don Quixote the hero learns that he is the subject of spurious adventures by a spurious author, we can only enjoy the pleasures of the meta narration. Nick Carraway also engages in snippets of metanarration, such as when we read that he is reviewing his work as he progresses with the writing:
“Reading what I have written so far, I see that I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. Rather, they were just casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs. ” (GG, 56).
In fact, they were no more than chance events, but closely intertwined with his own personal life. Although Nick presents Gastby’s life as the common thread, his own autobiographical data is woven into the fabric of the story.
While the absurd man narrator of Meursault-Camus of The stranger Nick Carraway chooses raw, mind-blowing slang to represent his alienation from the world, Nick Carraway chooses lyrical and often charming language to embellish the seedy world of a low-level American tragedy.
Nick takes licenses and reports rumors, a storyteller’s sin that jeopardizes his credibility. What’s disgusting is that in the end, Nick doesn’t report his cousin Daisy, even though he knows that Daisy was the driver that fated night and that Daisy kills Myrtle Wilson (Tom’s lover). Was this really an accident? Or did Daisy really run over Mrs. Wilson on purpose? We can only be guided by the memory of Gatsby’s accident as he tells Nick about it.
That Daisy was driving and maneuvering to overtake an oncoming car is clear. What follows is that Daisy first tries to avoid hitting Myrtle, but it is possible that when she recognizes Myrtle she changes her mind and runs her over. After all, Myrtle Wilson has been a constant thorn in his flesh all summer, causing him a lot of pain, anxiety, and depression.
While Nick tells us there was an investigation, he omits to tell us that he did not testify, even though his truthful testimony would have implicated his cousin Daisy. Nick later becomes an accessory to a hit-and-run crime cover-up. Also, on the night of the accident when Nick plays look at Tom, he watches Daisy and Tom in a conspiratorial tete-a-tete:
“They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the beer, and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy in the image, and anyone would have said they were conspiring together.” (GG, 145 ).
In the novel by García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude, when Remedios la Bella ascends to heaven, the reader accepts this fact because the woman in her simplicity never sees that her beauty hurts people; or even kills them. But when Nick Carraway paints Daisy as a southern beauty full of charm and innocence, he strikes a jarring note, because her actions disprove it.
Is Nick gay or bisexual? Nick has a fixation on noses and we see this underlying text surface throughout the narrative, and the only way to break the habit is to violently “break” it, just as Tom Buchanan does when he breaks his lover’s nose. Also, Daisy compares Nick to a flower: “Nick, you remind me of a … a rose, an absolute rose.” Are you implying that Nick is a locked up gay? Well, Nick never goes after Jordan with the vigor of a male in heat. And there is a scene where another man takes off his clothes.
During a meeting in New York, Nick meets Mr. McKee, a photographer: “Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man downstairs. He had just shaved because he had a white foam stain on his cheekbone (30) “. Then McKee takes Nick home where they spend the night. Nick later recalls: “I was standing next to his bed and he was sitting between the sheets, wearing his underwear.”
To confirm McKee’s homosexuality and because of Nick’s involvement, we see a phallic image when the elevator operator notices “hands off the lever.” To which McKee replies “I beg your pardon … I didn’t know I was touching him.” Was McKee touching the lever or the elevator operator? At the beginning of the 20th century, American literature had certain taboos that an author could only address and conquer as the Jew conquered Jericho, around and around and with noise. The noise is the carefully selected word codes and phallic images.
Can anyone imagine a straight man obsessed with another man ?:
“Mr. McKee was asleep in a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Pulling out my handkerchief, I wiped the remnants of the dried foam stain from her cheek that had worried me all afternoon. “(p. 36)
Nick Carraway, the narrator, never acknowledges that he is a nice pimp. Nick rents his house in West Egg with a man. “When a young man at the office suggested we rent a house together in a transit town, it seemed like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-worn cardboard bungalow in his eighties. years, a month, but at the last moment the firm ordered him to go to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. ” (p3).
If Nick is not gay, then he is bisexual: “I even had a brief affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother started throwing malicious glances in my direction, so when she continued her vacation in July I let it go quietly. ” (p. 56).
And as he wanders through downtown Manhattan, he fantasizes: “I used to like to walk down Fifth Avenue and pick romantic women out of the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would know or disapprove. Sometimes in In my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of a hidden street, and they turned and smiled at me before fading through a door into the warm darkness. ” (p. 56).
Look at Nick’s self-examination that carries the desperate musings of spinsters, spinsters, and old singles: “I was thirty years old. The porterus stretched out before me, the menacing path of a new decade (p135).” As he looks down the road to singleness at this point in his life, Nick considers a life, presumably a sex life only with single men: “The Thirty,” the promise of a decade of loneliness, an ever-shrinking list of men. Singles to meet, a briefcase increasingly thinning with enthusiasm, a thinning hair. “(p135) This is a moving comment that confirms his loneliness and how he will console himself in his high school.
Nick Carraway presents himself as a straightforward, unpretentious, and personable character who thrives on earning the trust of friends and strangers alike. However, there is nothing simple about it. As his narrative progresses and we get to know him better, we come to the conclusion that he is a complex character with many facets.
While many aspects of his personality are interesting, the reader cannot help being seduced by the moralistic preponderance of his judgments. On the surface, Nick presents himself as the voice of measure, reason, and virtue, but as we scrutinize his deepest layers, we find a series of wild emotions, impulses, desires, and irrationalities that border on a life. unstable and sexually confused, as he himself admits: “The behavior may be based on hard rock or wet swamps, but after a certain point I don’t care what it is based on.” (GG, 2).