The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway
The narrator
A young bond salesman from the Midwest who rents the small house next to Gatsby and tells the story of one summer on Long Island.
Nick Carraway comes East in the summer of 1922 to learn the bond business, renting a small bungalow in West Egg for eighty dollars a month. He is polite, watchful and slow to judge, a habit he traces to his father’s advice that not everyone has had the advantages he has had. The whole story reaches the reader through his eyes.
Nick is Daisy’s second cousin once removed and knew Tom in college, so he stands between the old-money and new-money worlds without fully belonging to either. People confide in him easily. Gatsby wants him as a friend and go-between, Jordan enjoys his company, and Tom treats him as an audience, while Nick keeps trying to stay honest and fair.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
In the story
Contains spoilers.
Nick is one of the few guests actually invited to Gatsby’s party, and he soon becomes Gatsby’s friend. At Jordan’s request he arranges the rainy-afternoon tea that brings Gatsby and Daisy together again, and he is pulled into the affair, the tense afternoon at the Plaza Hotel, and the night of Myrtle’s death.
After Gatsby is shot, Nick takes charge of the funeral and sees how few people come. Months later he meets Tom on Fifth Avenue and understands that Tom and Daisy are careless people who retreat into their money. Nick decides to move back West, and on his last night he sits on Gatsby’s beach and thinks about the green light and the pull of the past.
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