Nick Carraway Puns

He entered West Egg an innocent man and left with an awareness, but how?

It's a far cry from the riotous razzmatazz of all that partying, yet Carraway is, Smith suggests, the reason Fitzgerald's novel remains read.

"Maybe it's not the champagne and the dancing, maybe it is those feelings of wondering where we are, the sense that anything can crumble at any moment, that keep Gatsby meaningful from one generation to the next."

William Cain, an expert in American literature and the Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, agrees that Nick is crucial to understanding the novel's richness.

"Fitzgerald gave some thought to structuring it in the third person but ultimately he chose Nick Carraway, a first-person narrator who would tell Gatsby's story, and who would be an intermediary between us and Gatsby. We have to respond to and understand Gatsby and, as we do so, remain aware that we're approaching him through Nick's very particular perspective, and through Nick's very ambivalent relationship to Gatsby, which is simultaneously full of praise and full of severe criticism, even at some moments contempt," he says.

The American Dream is, of course, another of Gatsby's Big Themes, and one that continues to be misunderstood.

"Fitzgerald shows that that dream is very powerful, but that it is indeed a very hard one for most Americans to realise. It feeds them great hopes, great desires, and it's extraordinary, the efforts that so many of them make to fulfil those dreams and those desires, but that dream is beyond the reach of many, and many, they give up all too much to try to achieve that great success," Cain points out.

The Great Gatsby is synonymous with parties, glitz and glamour – but this is just one of many misunderstandings about the book that began from its first publication.

Misunderstanding has been a part of The Great Gatsby's story from the very start. Grumbling to his friend Edmund Wilson shortly after publication in 1925, Fitzgerald declared that "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about."

-Hephzibah Anderson, excerpted and adapted from The World's Most Misunderstood Novel

Caroline’s recent threat to cosplay Daisy Buchanan reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write down for a while. Is anyone else struck by just how much the Nat/CC dyad is like the Nick Carraway/Jay Gatsby dyad? Did we talk about this already and I just forgot because too much has happened since September? I am so tired.

Reading I Was Caroline Calloway feels like reading Gatsby in the same way that watching West Side Story feels like reading Romeo and Juliet. All the same elements are present, the action has just been shifted to a new setting.

Nat and Nick both come from privilege, but not wealth. They’re grounded, practical young people looking to start out in their chosen field. Then an insanely dramatic person with unfettered access to a shit ton of money comes into their lives.

And they’re fascinated, because they’ve never been this close to a person this performative, this dedicated to their own image, and this heedless of consequences. People like this only exist in movies, don’t they?

And they find to their surprise that the dramatic rich person is interested in forming an intense friendship with them. They are unused to this level of excitement, and cannot believe their good fortune at being invited along for the ride.

It’s crazy to be tagging along with this kind of society! Woo! Look at all this champagne! The furs! The stories you can tell in the morning! So crazy!

Unfortunately, it’s not the good kind of crazy. No real crazy ever is. The dramatic rich person is seriously afflicted with weird romantic obsessions. Their persona is false and out of control. The situation is dangerous and scary. Things turn upsetting and tragic.

Nick’s voice in Gatsby is that of a man looking back on events with distance and wisdom. He’s part of the story he’s telling, but rueful, and detached from it. His tenuous connection to Daisy is the only thing that really binds him to this world. To Gatsby this world might as well be the entire universe, since he has no identity outside of it.

(Incidentally, a big part of Gatsby’s identity is tied to having gone to Oxford, although he did not perform well there.)

There’s no sense that Nick is obsessed with Jay, wants to be Jay, or wants to fuck Jay. He’s initially enchanted by Jay, then feels sorry for him. He might have envied the Gatsby lifestyle before he saw it from inside.

But he sees that it’s all gilt, that everyone is miserable. He stares at the beautiful mansions on the water and marvels a

I recently finished re-reading The Great Gatsby (thanks social distancing) and I honestly gleaned a lot more out of it this time than when I least read it for high school English. I still don't regard it as The Great American Novel per se, but I recognize it as being far more complex than I originally thought. Truthfully though, I found Gatsby himself a rather flat and two dimensional character. The real point of interest for me was the narrator Nick Carraway.

When I first closed the book I sympathized him, but in the days that have passed and as I begin to think about the novel more, I'm starting to wonder if he is also somewhat to blame? I once read Nick described as an idiot because he is guilty of the things he judges others for, and because he objectifies the women in his life and ignores their problems to focus on his own internal problems and feelings. I was wondering to what extent you agreed with this, and how he is a hypocrite.

I know he claims to be honest and yet gets involved in the affair of Gatsby and Daisy, but at the same time he knew Tom was having an affair and seemed to be conscious of Daisy’s unhappiness at home. So it seemed like he was aware of Daisy’s problems on some level and was trying to help her, unless your interpretation is that his sole motivation was to curry favor with Gatsby. He does describe her voice as being filled with money, but he also seems aware that Daisy is a human and can’t possibly live up to Gatsby’s idealization of her, which I feel suggests he is aware of Daisy as more than just an object, unlike the other men of the book.

As for Jordan, do you agree or disagree that his break up with her was justified? They were both in on helping the affair but to me it seemed Nick was shocked by Jordan’s callousness towards Myrtle’s death more than anything else. I know that was the quality that initially attracted him to her, but could have he foreseen how callous she would be when confronted with death? So from my perspective, it is Jordan and the other elites who objectified Myrtle as just some meaningless working class mistress, while Nick was the only one conscious of her being a real person. And as for focusing on his own problems, it seemed like he did engage in introspection and self-reflection, but he also seemed to be the only one who cared about the others, especially Gatsby, and didn’t write them off (except Tom) until almost anyone would. He was carrying on an affair with someone back home while with

I was thinking something like "frame character" but found no results on Google.

So i was driving through New Haven in my 1929 lemon-yellow Duesenberg and I see this guy in a blue knitted sweater and I’m like “hey do u go to Yale” and he’s like “yeah” and I’m like “oh really name the editor of the Yale daily news” and he’s like “that’s me, Nick Carraway” and tbh he looks like a cuck but anyways I tell him to hop in my sweet ass vehicle and we speed out to my mansion in West Egg like two souped-up maniacs and I tell him about this girl I’m just crazy about she’s called Daisy, and she’s all like “I’m a beautiful little fool lmao” and gee whizz she’s a corker I’ll tell you that for free haha. But right now she’s dating this asshole on the football team or the golf team or whatever I think his name’s Tom??. But tbh I really feel like if she’d date me I would finally feel that ever-elusive sense of completeness allegedly promised by the American Dream, and get over my insecurities about my rags-to-riches immigrant past but like it’s whatever. So me and Nick are getting real close over this weekend, we’re out here smoking cigarettes with cigarette holders like some total goons haha and he’s swinging on the chandelier every night and he’s all like “I revere but also am reviled by all this bourgeois decadence lmao!” And I’m like stfu this isn’t a ydn op-ed, also tell that girl Jordan Baker to chill with the golf club and he’s like she gives me weird vibes but she’s also p hot imo?

Anyways so I’m out on my balcony just vaping like a champ and staring at the green light and 100% experiencing the ennui of the alienated capitalist subject and also wondering if love is a real phenomenon lmao and then I’m like Nicky boy waddya say you put down the ydn features section for a minute and come rhapsodise about America with me. But he’s gone skrrrting in the vehicle with Daisy and she must have popped one too many adderal bc she absolutely trucks thru this girl Myrtle on the road and everyone’s like ‘fuuuuuck’ bc Myrtle is rly dead as shit like it’s not looking good for her at all. Anyways that asshole Tom on the ultimate frisbee team blames it on me, and so Myrtle’s husband (massive alpha to be fair) comes to my house and totally shoots me loads of times. And I’m like dead in the pool, I’m out here like some sort of metonymy for a fictitious prophecy of this bastard country, magnificent in the tragedy of my aesthetics tbh. And I hit one last massive vape (more like the great vapesby am I right) as I float amidst the blood of my bullet wounds and that

Ok, so I was just looking at my window and then I don't know why I started thinking of The Great Gatsby. But I was thinking particularly of the part where Nick is drunk and seems to be in bed with another man (something similar to that). Also, it's weird how he described Gatsby (although I do understand that such language may have been acceptable back in older times), but it really makes me wonder if he was gay? Furthermore, he liked Jordan, who displayed many tom-boyish features and I remember there was this part where Fitzgerald mentioned that he liked the precipitation on top of Jordan's upper lip (or something very similar to this, I don't recall exactly what he wrote). Isn't that similar to a man's mustache?

So Nick Carraway turns 30 during the events of The Great Gatsby, but based on the exposition in the novel, it seems like he's never had a real job (he's going out East to learn the bonds business), and he comes off closer to a recent college grad than like someone who should be well into his working years (he buys textbooks to learn about the bonds business, but never bothers to read them). So what was he doing in his 20's, if he doesn't even start studying for a career until he's nearly 30? I get that he served during the world war, but I mean, American involvement in that war, was like one year, maybe? He wasn't exactly a professional soldier. Was he just chilling out in the midwest sponging off his parents?

I'm asking this because we malign millenials for getting a late start in their careers these days, but if the character of Nick Carraway is any indication, it's not historically anomolous that people start working only in their late twenties.

so i’ve realized that i really enjoy books where the narrator is a nick carraway-type, who spends the book giving a (usually unreliable and overly-romanticized) account of a character or characters who fascinated them; ie nick in the great gatsby, richard papen in the secret history, rose in the other typist, the narrator in the virgin suicides, even the narrator in fight club

all of those examples are incredibly different of course, and i’m not so fussed about plot or genre. but for some reason i’m really interested in these infatuated, unreliable, nostalgic narrators who are so wholly unable to see the truth of these objects of their affection, and unable to see the truth of what happened to them, how or whether they were involved, etc

thank you all in advance!

A little info about me-- I just got a masters degree in english at a pretty good institution. I didn't read the great gatsby in that program. I read it once in undergrad and once in high school and both times they told me Nick Carraway should not be trusted. I don't think they ever told me where his subjective viewpoint belies his honesty, however. What am I missing?