Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, educated at Yale, served during the First World War, living in New York to learn the bond business, claims to be different from the others, but I think he isn't.
Nick starts the story off by introducing himself as an honest man, who reserves judgement. However instead of seeing him stick to his words, we see him contradict himself several times, for example, by doubting that Gatsby is a good person before even meeting him.
Another fault that I can not ignore is that he goes to meet Tom's lover, and does not object to anything even once. He does not even think about defending Daisy, his cousin. Nick prefers to observe his surroundings, in fact, he finds the atmosphere of the party quite interesting.
Another action that would not be expected from a honest and moral man would be for him to almost push Daisy to be unfaithful, because if he hadn't arranged a meeting, Daisy wouldn't have gone out looking for Gatsby or true love or happiness. Even if Nick believed that Daisy was stuck in a loveless marriage, and this is something that he can not know for sure, and even if he thought it Tom wouldn't be able to object because he himself is in an affair, or even if he knew that this behaviour was expected from people like Daisy and Tom and knew for sure that they would forgive each other, what he did was just simply wrong.
One last thing that I don't understand about Nick is why he chooses to stay in New York. He doesn't have anything holding him back. His meretricious girlfriend Jordan, is not a factor. His job is not everything he has, he can easily find other one. Then why does he wait so long to move back to the Midwest? Maybe it's because he wants to see how things will play about between Gatsby, Daisy and Tom, maybe he's curious, maybe he wants to see them suffer, and he does do this, he stays, without interfering once, or trying to help his "friends" and "relatives" fix their problems and get out of the mess that they are in.
No comments:
Post a Comment