"THE GREAT GATSBY". F.
SCOTT FITZGERALD. CORINNENOTES
"THE GREAT GATSBY". F.
SCOTT FITZGERALD.
QUESTION 2.
EVALUATE NICK'S JOB AS A NARRATOR.
We may talk of Gatsby as the "man who gives his name to the book" but of equal importance is the man who doesn't give his name to the book - Nick Carraway. Fitzgerald's book is Nick's book after all, though crucially Nick isn't Fitzgerald however many refracted biographical fragments we may imagine that we can discern. Indeed while we read Gatsby we are also reading Nick and whatever conclusion we make about Gatsby and his "greatness" reflects our judgement on Nick and his prowess as a narrator. Ultimately whatever judgement we make has to be affected by the fact that, good or bad, as a narrator Nick is deeply flawed.
The extent to which Gatsby's story is Nick's version cannot be overstated.Nick is a character with confessedly limited literary talents, he has written only "a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News". In addition to his own memory there are documents, such as Gatsby's copy of Hopalong Cassidy and the list of Gatsby's guests of the summer of 1922, which is now "disintegrating at its folds" which also suggests the inevitable disintegration of our narrator's memory. Added to this there are the long oral accounts of Gatsby's life given to him by Jordan and Gatsby. These however are all transcribed by Nick and we can never know how much he is translating them, embellishing, amplifying or rewording. Only about four percent of the novel is in Gatsby's actual words meaning that he is an elusive figure and that the rest of the comment on his character is created by Nick's hypothesising. Nick's account is marked by words and phrases such as : "I suppose", "I suspect", "I think", "possibly", "probably", "perhaps", "I've heard it said", "I have an idea that", "I always had the impression", "As though" and "as if" (used over sixty times). "Possibly it occurred to him..." and possibly it didn't. As the reader we can never know. We do however know that it occurred to Nick. Nick undoubtedly has a tendency to identify with Gatsby. From Gatsby's first appearance he is labelled as "a man of about my own age" and after his death Nick experiences a "feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all". This identification with Gatsby is why it is so important for Nick to believe that his account is "all true" and why he is glad to have "one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I'd experienced before". Nick invests everything in Gatsby, the "great" Gatsby.
As Nick is an ever present narrator his character plays its own crucial role in his abilities, or lack of them, as a narrator. He portrays himself as the very antithesis of Gatsby, rather like Lockwood putting together his account of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights . His life is "dismal" consisting of "pig sausages and mashed potato" and "wasting the most poignant moments of night and life". Given this it is unsurprising that Nick looks for signs of the "gorgeous" (one of his favourite words)in Gatsby's life. He implies he is everything that Gatsby isn't: "a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair". As if to compensate for this he deliberately makes Gatsby "gorgeous". In the game of life Nick is a spectator while Gatsby is the performer he so desperately needs. He even sees Gatsby in gestural terms "If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life". Nick's favoured position in life is most definitely on the margins, at the first party in New York his instinct is to "get out". He prefers the role of "casual watcher in the darkening streets" which can be considered to be a highly important quality for a narrator. In order to wonder at you cannot participate after all. This however has to be carefully measured against the fact that Nick's capacity for wonder has its counterpart in his capacity for "repulsion". For all of the impartial tone of the novel it is generated by the tendency to move between these extremes. In such a world, unlike life, everything is either black or white without any shades of grey. Nick's book is also coloured, in his mind at the very least, by either black or white. Grey is simply not a possibility for him. Nick's character also has some decidedly authoritarian leanings or as he puts it a "sense of fundamental decencies" which cause him to wish that "the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever". He has a distinct instinct for hygiene and tidiness which manifests itself in a dislike of "refuse" and causes him to wipe away the stray shaving foam from Mr McKee's face which had "worried me all afternoon". Even more pertinently it causes him to remove the graffiti from outside Gatsby's "huge incoherent failure of a house": "On the white steps an obscene word scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone". Nick's tidiness combined with his almost hero worship of Gatsby means that he also subjects Gatsby's story to some pretty radical erasure. Gatsby's life is after all based around a series of criminal activities yet in the black and white world of Nick, Gatsby cannot be romantic and criminal.He of course claims that he is telling the story "to clear this set of misconceptions away", which he undoubtedly does but he also cleans up other things beside. This of course involves ignoring large parts of Gatsby's character even when Gatsby himself blatantly wants to stress such characteristics. When Gatsby claims to have come from the mid-west, specifically San Fransisco, Nick replies with the neutral "I see". This is Gatsby showing Nick his deception and yet Nick manages to ignore it. Nick again uses the neutral "I see" after Gatsby explains why he has replaced his staff. Of course constant suspicion is hardly an attractive characteristic and there is something endearing about Nick's willingness to trust Gatsby but such a characteristic hardly bodes well for an impartial narrator.
Nick's greatest flaw as a narrator though is his romantisisation of life and subsequently Gatsby's story. His account of Gatsby's adolescence is a perfect example of this:
"A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to his fancies...they were...a promise that the rock of the world was founded on a fairy's wing".
This is Nick imagining what Gatsby was imagining and therefore the lines between Nick and Gatsby are horridly blurred. Exactly whose adolescence is it? Nick's? Gatsby's? Or should we really label it "Nick Gatsby's"? The moon represents the dream while the clock is history and irreversibility which we learn Gatsby spent his life battling against.Yet Nick also prefers the "moonlight" and Gatsby provides him with an outlet for his imagination or the "unreality of reality". He may state that he "reserve[s] all judgements" but in actuality he does the opposite of this in the novel. He has also noticed that because of this reservation of judgement people tend to tell him "intimate revelations" and that they "are usually plagaristic and marred by obvious suppressions". This also works for Nick's account of Gatsby, despite the fact that he is "abnormally" honest. This tendency to allow his imagination to colour his story is also shown by his response to the Valley of Ashes on his first viewing. He believes that "sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead". Such a romantic as Nick cannot tolerate a reality which is merely poor, broken and desolate. There has to be another dimension which corresponds more correctly with his view of life and if Nick cannot immediately see it he will invent one. Again he exhibits this tendency in his reaction to Gatsby's comment that Daisy's voice is "full of money". He interprets this to mean that Daisy is "high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl", to him Daisy's voice is "thrilling". Yet Gatsby's statement could also be interpreted as meaning that Daisy is an expensive product who actually breathes money and that he is aware of this. When Nick later states that "I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth" it is likely that this was what held Nick rather than Gatsby. He again superimposes his own "appalling sentimentality" on to Gatsby when describing his relationship with Daisy - Gatsby actually took Daisy "unscrupulously and ravenously" and probably had little thought of "utterable visions". As the reader we cannot be sure where the nostalgic regressive emotions are actually coming from, they are simply in the air, in the writing and the writing is Nick's. The green light may therefore be stronger for Nick than for any of the other characters.
At other times Nick actually evokes Plato and God to back up that what he is saying is the "truth". This shows Nick's need for something real, something in his world which isn't "accidental". However much this desire is confused it is still there, a metaphysical and theological desire for something substantial which can only manifest itself in the man in the pink suit. Gatsby cannot be just a criminal to Nick any more than the valley of ashes can be just poor or America just America. Nick even refers to "a night scene by El Greco".El Greco is famous for his exaggerations and this may well be a hint that Nick has given the reader an El Greco-ish version - heightened, exaggerated, distorted. "They're a rotten crowd...You're worth the whole damn bunch put together". So they are and so - Nick can make us feel - he is. Americaa has to have produced something better than the Buchanans, more splendid than the Carraways and that something could be Gatsby. Yet distortion can never really be separated from representation and Nick shows this problem in his description of east and west egg:
"Their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size".
One of these views has to be distorted. Something cannot be exactly identical and totally different at the same time. Yet which view? Like the colour of Gatsby's car it all depends on where you stand, or in the case of the eggs from what height you approach from. The Gatsby egg may appear the same as the Buchannan egg but if you look close enough there may be enough differences to justify Nick's story as well as the label of "great Gatsby".
So should we label Nick as a good or bad narrator? In showing us the story of Nick writing Gatsby and all the problems it involves Fitzgerald is showing us the problem, as well as what might be at stake, in trying to write America. Nick's task as a narrator is therefore enormous, with the justification of a nation in his hands. Added to this he is also a highly likeable narrator who portrays a character who sticks in our hearts due to the fact he exists in a wasteland of ashes and accidents. Yet Nick, for all his supposed honesty, manipulates the truth, hides the facts which could turn Gatsby into an Anti-hero and generally removes the graffiti. So what judgement should we pass? I think the answer to that is that we shouldn't. The entire novel is an elusive mix of unrecognisability and familiarity. Nick may want to paint the world in black and white but he can't and we cannot possibly judge him on such terms. Fitzgerald himself was never quite sure whether he loved or hated the society he lived in and this is an important part of his novel - and his narrator. Good or bad is too simplistic to use in connection to anything in the novel (with the possible exception of Tom) and would undermine Nick's epitaph to Gatsby which is more eloquent than Owl Eye's "poor son of a bitch" but just as fitting. Like east and west egg the quality of Nick and his narration is all relative on how hard you look and how high you are willing, or able, to fly.