Perspective of Nick Carraway, Narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby :: The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

Narrators Perspective in The Great Gatsby break off Carraway has a special place in this novel. He is not just sensation character among several, it is through his eyes and ears that we form our opinions of the other characters. Often, readers of this novel confuse Nicks stance towards those characters and the initiation he describes with those of F. Scott Fitzgeralds because the fictional world he has created closely resembles the world he himself experienced. But not every narrator is the representative of the author. Before considering the gap between author and narrator, we should remember how, as readers, we respond to the narrators perspective, especially when that voice belongs to a character who, like Nick, is an active participant in the story. When we read any work of fiction, no matter how realistic or fabulous, as readers, we support a suspension of disbelief. The fictional world creates a new set of boundaries, making possible or credible events and reactions tha t might not ordinarily occur in the real world, but which have a logic or a plausibility to them in that fictional world. In come in for this to be convincing, we trust the narrator. We take on his perspective, if not totally, then substantially. He becomes our eyes and ears in this world and we have to see him as reliable if we argon to proceed with the storys development. In The Great Gatsby, Nick goes to some length to establish his credibility, indeed his moral integrity, in telling this story slightly this great humanness called Gatsby. He begins with a reflection on his own upbringing, quoting his fathers words about Nicks advantages, which we could assume were material but, he soon makes clear, were spiritual or moral advantages. Nick wants his reader to know that his upbringing gave him the moral fiber with which to withstand and pass judgment on an amoral world, such as the one he had observed the preliminary summer. He says, rather pompously, that as a consequence of such an upbringing, he is inclined to reserve all judgments about other people, but then goes on to say that such tolerance . . . has a limit. This is the first sign that we can trust this narrator to give us an even-handed insight to the story that is about to unfold. But, as we later learn, he neither reserves all judgments nor does his tolerance reach its limit.