The Great Gatsby Post

Towards the end of the book, I began to realize that Nick, who in every other novel would have been the main character of the story, did not seem to be the main focus of The Great Gatsby. We were essentially hearing the story of Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and their upper-class shenanigans through Nick, and not Nick’s actual story. This revelation came to me during the hotel room scene where Tom confronts Gatsby and Daisy about their affair. After the climax of the event has taken place and things seem to calm down for a moment, Nick suddenly realizes that it was his birthday. Something he would have probably noticed much sooner, had be not been entangled with other people’s affaires. There is a very small portion of the novel devoted to Nick, except of the very beginning and a few moments between him and Jordan (a love story that is tossed aside to make room for the more scandalous story of Gatsby). We, as the readers, don’t even get a clear picture of Nick as a character. While other characters, like Gatsby and Tom, have various characteristics pointed out to us, Nick’s characteristics remain a mystery to us. This is most likely due to the fact that this is a first person narrative, but could also relate to the theme of the novel.
The Great Gatsby is known to be a story that encapsulates the lust for spectacle that overtook America in the 1920’s. Gatsby’s parties drew upper class people out of their expensive houses to dance, socialize, and hopefully have some outrageous story to tell the next morning. When they didn’t have those stories to tell, they had rumors, much like the ones that followed the mysterious Gatsby around. Nick becomes our eye into their world, showing us how one can lose himself in the fast passed world illustrated. In fact, as the book opens, and before Nick meets the subjects of his story, he tells us of his past, and this is the only insight we are given into Nick. Once he comes into contact with the other characters, he is immediately lost in their lives. He pursues their stories so much that he disregards the other happenings of his life. When time elapses between confrontations with these other characters, Nick simply skips them and lets us know that we are now several months into the future without any tales of in between.
At the end of the novel, I do think Nick is taking hold of his life once again. First there is the sobering accident in which Myrtle is killed, and Nick sees that Gatsby and the others have also lost themselves in some form or fashion. Gatsby gives his life over to the dream that him and Daisy will be together, Daisy has receded back into her marriage where she can be safe from all the trouble of the outside world, and Tom has hidden under his masculine persona to rid himself of guilt for what he put the people around him through. Nick then breaks ties with the people that he’s met, most notably Jordan Baker. This comes with a line from Nick where he tells Jordan that is too old to lie to himself, signaling his growth from the beginning of the novel. He is now too old to play with dreams and desires of his youth, especially now that he sees the danger in living childishly. Right before Nick leaves West Egg, he walks up to Gatsby’s stairs and erases a vulgar word that a child has etched. This is Nick trying to clean Gatsby’s name. For a man that did so much in his life, Nick knows that the final days he lived should not be what he is remembered by. The story has shown Nick that the entanglement in the lives of others come with the price of your own story. He leaves all of this behind to create his own story and not simply be a part of somebody else’s.