Nick leaves the Midwest after he returns from the war, restless and at odds with the traditional, conservative values that, from his account, haven’t changed in spite of the tumult of the war. It is this insularity from a changed world no longer structured by the values that had sent young men to war, that decides him to go
The only genuine affection in the novel is shown by Nick towards Gatsby. He admires Gatsby’s optimism, an attitude that is out of step with the sordidness of the times. Fitzgerald illustrates this sordidness not just in the Valley of Ashes, but right there beneath the thin veneer of the opulence represented by Daisy and Tom. Nick is “in love” with Gatsby’s capacity to dream and ability to live as if the dream were to come true, and it is this that clouds his judgment of Gatsby and therefore obscures our grasp on Gatsby.
When Gatsby takes Nick to one side and tells him of his origins, he starts to say that he was “the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West – all dead now . . .” The truth (of his origins) does not matter to Gatsby; what matters to him is being part of Daisy’s world or Daisy being a part of his. Gatsby’s sense of what is true and real
is of an entirely other order from Nick’s. If he were motivated by truth, Gatsby would still be poor Jay Gatz with a hopelessly futile dream.
In the passage where Nick says to Gatsby that you can’t repeat the past, and Gatsby’s incredulity at this. Nick begins to understand for the first time the level of Gatsby’s desire for a Daisy who no longer exists. It astounds Nick: “I gathered that he wanted to recover something . . . that had gone into loving Daisy . . . out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees . . . Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something – an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago . . .”
The Essay on The Dynamic Gatsby Nick Daisy Man
The Great Gatsby is a book filled with dynamic characters, written by a dynamic person. Throughout the book, the themes and situations are on many symbolic levels. The Great Gatsby is such a novel, that the hero is portrayed to the reader by a man who, with seemingly no effort, will not judge a man easily. He perceives him, takes him in, and analyzes him. This man's name is not, in fact, Gatsby, ...
These are Nick’s words. Whose “appalling sentimentality” is operating here? Has Nick reported any of Gatsby’s words – which comprise so little of the novel – to suggest that he would even begin to put his love for Daisy in these “sentimental” terms? Is not this excess of sentiment in fact Nick’s sentiment for Gatsby or perhaps Nick’s attempt at displaying those “rather literary” days he had in college? Or both?
The reader should consider the distance that Fitzgerald has created between his presence in the story and Nick’s and their implications. Fitzgerald has created a most interesting character in Nick because he is very much a fallible storyteller.
When an author unsettles an accepted convention in the art of storytelling by creating a narrator like Nick, it draws attention to the story as fiction, as artifice. Ironically, in doing this, he has created in Nick a figure who more closely resembles an average human being and thus has heightened the realism of the novel.
