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The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Decent Essays

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a story narrated by Nick Carraway who was a young man that moved from Minnesota to New York. Nick moves to New York in the summer of 1922, right in the middle of the roaring twenties with the hopes of learning more about the bonds business. Nick moves to West Egg and his house neighbours a large, Gothic mansion belonging to Jay Gatsby. Nick Carraway is a first person narrator, more specifically he is a peripheral narrator. A peripheral narrator has their own part in the story but are not a main character and they witnesses the main character’s story and tells it to the reader. An important fact to note that Nick Carraway is an unreliable narrator. An unreliable narrator is a narrator who …show more content…

Jordan discuss how Daisy called her over and that;s when she saw how “[t]he officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby” (73). However, Nick states earlier in the novel that Jordan Baker is someone he deems “incurably dishonest” (58) due to his remembrance of an event in which “…she had moved her back from a bad lie” (58). Nick also uses accounts from Gatsby to learn about what went on between him and Daisy. During the conversation between Gatsby and Nick in chapter eight, Gatsby tells Nick that, "I don 't think she ever loved him” (144) and then again, Gatsby states “[o]f course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were first married — and loved me more even then, do you see?” (145). This is where Nick becomes an unreliable narrator, because Nick is unable to know what occurred when Daisy and Gatsby met and the feelings between the two, so he is relying on outside sources to share their version of how the events went down. Which is why Nick is unreliable because he is hearing the character’s individual accounts that could be filled with bias, not what actually happened.

Nick is judgmental despite his claims that he is not and this causes him to be an unreliable narrator. The very first page of the novel, Nick states that he

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