Does “The Great Gatsby” Have a Reliable Narrator?
The author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is in some sense the narrator of the novel in that he created the story for the fictional narrator, Nick Carraway, but scholars and critics distinguish a story’s narrative voice from the author’s own voice even if no specific character tells the reader the story.
In Fitzgerald’s novel, then, we can identify Nick Carraway as the narrator, and while he is similar in many respects to the author, he is not an exact doppelganger. Nick attended Yale College, for instance, while Fitzgerald attended Princeton.
While Fitzgerald must be considered a reliable narrator of the Gatsby saga, since he created it, his fictional narrator, Nick, is often described as unreliable because he develops an emotional attachment to Gatsby’s capacity to dream. This attachment grows along side an antipathy for his cousin Daisy’s cynicism and an abhorrence for her husband Tom’s generally corrupted soul.
So, Nick presents Gatsby’s story as the tragedy of the destruction of a true believer in love, second chances, and the American Dream, by a cynical and corrupt American aristocracy that has bought the accoutrements of the American Dream to furnish its sordid lives.
Why might Nick’s version of the Gatsby story be unreliable? A genuinely objective observer of Gatsby’s story might just as easily have presented him as a liar, a phony, and a scofflaw as the novel contains strong hints that Jimmy Gatz of North Dakota farm stock became the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby through such nefarious means as bootlegging and illicit gambling.
