Keagen Gorkowski
Mrs. Montgomery
AP Language
17 October 2013
The Great Nick In a book, there are many people that could be a narrator, and picking one person is crucial for a novel. The author F. Scott Fitzgerald managed to pick the greatest narrator that he could out of all the characters he had in his book The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway. Nick is the ideal narrator for the book The Great Gatsby. He is one of the only characters who tells the truth about everything. “I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.”(Fitzgerald 2) He says things how they are, and is not biased to anyone’s side no matter what. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
(Fitzgerald 1) With Nick being the narrator, the reader got a fair background of all the other characters as a whole than any other person could have done while being a little modest. “Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”(Fitzgerald 59) He looked up to Gatsby, and that is what the story needed. To be told by someone who thought Gatsby was significant and a key role to the story. Also, Nick was the only character who seemed to not get himself involved in much drama, plus he knew what was going on between all the other characters. This gave him very deep and understanding viewpoints of the plot and conflict of the story. A character who would not make a very good narrator is Tom Buchanan. Tom gives off the vibe that he is better than others. "You're crazy!" he exploded. "I can't speak about what happened five years ago, because I didn't know Daisy then—and I'll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back door. But all the rest of that's a God damned lie. Daisy loved me when she married me and she loves me now."(Fitzgerald 131) He feels that he can just go and buy people to 'own' them. "She's not leaving me!" Tom's words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. "Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring he put on her finger."(Fitzgerald 133) If he was chosen as the narrator, the story would not be as fair as it was written by Nick. Tom would have written about himself a lot. About his affair with Myrtle, his lack of relationship with Daisy, and the perspective of Gatsby would have been very different. Another character in this story who would not make a very good narrator is Daisy Buchanan. If Daisy were to have narrated the story, it would have been more focused her and what she wanted out of life because she was not really in love with Tom and that she wanted to be with Gatsby. She was in such love with Gatsby that she could not stand to be around his shirts. "They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the think folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such – such beautiful shirts before."(Fitzgerald 92) In the beginning of the book, things would have been peachy and cheery because things were working out between her and