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Katrina Schroeder
Grade: 11
Title: The Great Carraway
Genre: Essay
EF: Maria Claudia Schroeder
The Great Carraway
The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a novel set in the fictional town of
West Egg in the 1920s. The story is primarily concerned with Jay Gatsby and his obsession with
Daisy Buchanan. Although the title establishes Gatsby as central to the story, his character and
trajectory are sculpted by the curious words of Nick Carraway, Daisy’s second cousin and a newcomer to West Egg. Nick Carraway narrates the story with a wonderstruck, yet level-headed
persona without which the genuine intimacy and indispensable mystery of the novel would be
lost.
The first person point of view used in The Great Gatsby plays a crucial role in gradually
growing a mood of intimacy which would be lost if portrayed by an omniscient narrator.
Through Carraway’s description of his first impression of Gatsby, readers get a sense of the
book’s trademark amity: “I decided to call to him…But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden
intimation that he was content to be alone – he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a
curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I
glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that
might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I
was alone again in the unquiet darkness” (pg. 20). Carraway describes his first glimpse of Gatsby
with such thoughtful detail that readers are drawn in as if Nick was an old friend recounting a
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story to them and them alone. The well-developed sense of friendship established by Nick
Carraway’s intricately detailed first person narration provides the book with a vital value that
could not be achieved through an omniscient narrator’s all-knowing, detached account.
Carraway’s intimate narration is again displayed as he thinks to himself while at a party with
Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan: “I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the Park
through soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident
argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of
yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the
darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without,
simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (pg. 35). By
revealing his most intimate thoughts and opinions, Nick Carraway evokes a closeness with
readers who, due to this bond, become emotionally invested in the plotline. Through an
omniscient point of view, readers would be given sporadic, inconsistent insight into every
character’s thoughts and would be unable to develop a bond with any one character, prohibiting
intimacy. Through his narration, Nick Carraway develops a friendship with readers of The Great
Gatsby, and this almost-palpable relationship creates that invaluable sense of intimacy without
which the novel would become flat and impersonal.
While the intimacy of the novel contributes largely to the story’s intrigue, Jay Gatsby’s
tale is riveting primarily due to Gatsby’s mysterious character. Because of Nick Carraway’s first
person point of view, readers learn as he learns, discover as he discovers and are compelled to
continue following Carraway’s narrative in order to unravel the mystery of Gatsby, a literary
journey that, if told through an all-knowing perspective, would lose its suspense and dampen its
readers’ desire to continue turning pages. Halfway through the novel, Gatsby tells Nick
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Carraway of his past, and Nick begins to doubt: “He hurried the phrase ‘educated at Oxford,’ or
swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his
whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about
him, after all” (pg. 65). As Carraway is told of Gatsby’s past, he notices an aberration in
Gatsby’s speech which arouses doubt and a kind of cautious intrigue in Carraway and, therefore,
in the reader. This doubt, which would not have occurred without Carraway’s narration, sparks
curiosity in readers and drives them to read on. After Gatsby’s death, his father visits Carraway
and begins to reminisce: “‘He come out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live
in now. Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see now there was a reason
for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him. And ever since he made a success he was very
generous with me’” (pg. 172). Nick Carraway and, therefore, the reader, must wait until the end
of the novel to ascertain information about Gatsby’s family and childhood. Had Fitzgerald opted
for an all-knowing narrator, the reader would most likely have been told of Gatsby’s past far
earlier in the story. The fact that readers must read to the end of the novel, all the while
pondering what has been revealed about Gatsby and wondering what still lies behind the veil,
creates suspense and intrigue that would scarcely be present if the narrator were omniscient.
Through the voice of his character, Nick Carraway, F. Scott Fitzgerald expertly unravels
the page-turning tale of Jay Gatsby. The decision to write his novel through the voice of one
character, instead of an omniscient narrator, has been validated over 25 million times as each
copy sells. Nick Carraway’s narration nearly single-handedly saturates the literary work with
intimacy and mystery through deepening familiarity and perfectly placed revelations. Carraway’s
narration has proven to be imperative to the portrayal of intimacy and mystery without which the
novel would be hard-pressed to have become the classic it is today.