Nick Carraway
Nick Carraway, fictional character, the compassionate young narrator of American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925). As Jay Gatsby’s neighbor in West Egg, Long Island, Nick Carraway has ample opportunity to observe the wealthy but unfortunate Gatsby as he pursues his version of the American Dream.
Nick Carraway as the voice of The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick in a series of flashbacks. A Midwestern transplant to the East Coast and a Yale University graduate, Nick moved to New York to work in the bonds business after serving in World War I. Most of the novel takes place in 1922. That spring Nick takes a home in the fictional village of West Egg, where he lives modestly amid the colossal mansions of the newly rich—including Gatsby, a self-made millionaire who regularly throws lavish parties but retains an air of mystery. Across the water is the more refined East Egg, where Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan lives with her husband, Tom, and their very young daughter, Pammy.
Early in the novel Nick meets Jordan Baker, a golf champion, at a gathering at the Buchanans. Over dinner she mentions Gatsby, but the night’s discussion quickly shifts to other topics, including rumors of Nick’s engagement to a woman back in the Midwest. Nick dispels the rumors, telling his hosts, “It’s a libel. I’m too poor.” After returning home to West Egg, Nick catches sight of Gatsby standing alone in the dark and stretching his arms out to a green light burning across the bay at the end of Tom and Daisy’s dock.
Nick hears unsavory rumors about his neighbor at a party in Manhattan with Tom; Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson; and other guests. Later, Nick receives an invitation to one of Gatsby’s parties, where he encounters Jordan and hears more dark theories about Gatsby’s past. When he finally comes face-to-face with Gatsby at the party, Nick is struck by the “quality of eternal reassurance” in Gatsby’s smile before seeing through his facade to the “elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.”
Later in the summer Nick becomes romantically involved with Jordan and develops a friendship with Gatsby, who tells a skeptical Nick that he is the son of very wealthy people who are all dead and that he is an Oxford man and a war hero. Through Jordan, Nick learns that Gatsby knew Daisy almost five years earlier in Louisville, Kentucky. They had been in love, but after Gatsby left to fight in the war, she married Tom. Still in love with her, Gatsby bought his house on West Egg so he could be across the water from her.
As the novel unfolds, Nick becomes an accomplice to an affair between Gatsby and Daisy. Gatsby is revealed to be an imposter: Born poor in North Dakota, he changed his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby and made his riches through bootlegging. One particularly hot afternoon, after jealousy flares during a lunch between Tom, Daisy, Gatsby, Nick, and Jordan, tragedy occurs when Daisy accidentally kills Myrtle Wilson while driving Gatsby’s car. The following day Gatsby is shot to death by Myrtle’s husband, George. Nick arranges Gatsby’s funeral, although only two people attend, one of whom is Gatsby’s father. Afterward, Nick moves back to the Midwest, disgusted with life in the East.
Character analysis
“Everyone 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.”—Nick Carraway
Nick’s narration discloses little about himself compared with his close observations of the enigmatic Gatsby. He gives few clues about his own physical appearance. He is 29 when the events of the novel begin, his 30th birthday coincidentally being the same day that Myrtle is killed.
The most revealing moments regarding Nick’s character are when he describes his relationship with Jordan. He exposes as much about himself as about Jordan when he says that she “instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest.” Rather than be alarmed by this awareness, Nick continues, “It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.” Jordan, meanwhile, tells Nick, “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”
Yet, Nick then reveals (to the reader, not to Jordan) that he is still breaking off his relationship with a woman back home, presumably the same woman that he claimed he was not engaged to. Explaining his need to disentangle himself from this other relationship, he says, “Everyone 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.” By the novel’s end, however, Nick’s romance with Jordan sours, and she ultimately tells him she misjudged him to be “an honest, straightforward person.”
Despite Nick’s disgust with the East after Gatsby’s death, he professes an affinity with the people who formed his social circle there, suggesting that their shared backgrounds contributed to the summer’s tragic end: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”
Nick Carraway in real life and in film
Critics have noted similarities between The Great Gatsby’s narrator and its author. Notably, Nick hails from the Midwest and went east to attend an Ivy League college, as did F. Scott Fitzgerald (Princeton University, in his case). In addition, Fitzgerald served in the army during World War I. Yet, these are some of Gatsby’s experiences, too, and some critics think that the two central male characters represent dual aspects of Fitzgerald.
In film Nick has been portrayed by such actors as Sam Waterston (1974), Paul Rudd (2000), and Tobey Maguire (2013).