preview

Examples Of Dishonesty In The Great Gatsby

Decent Essays

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a novel of ambiguity – we rarely see his characters for who they truly are. They are often masked, hidden behind façades of insincerity and ill integrity. Just about every person involved in the complex plot of the novel seems to have their own agenda, trampling others underfoot in wake of their own pursuit of romantic, social or monetary gain, and the narrator is no exception. Although he makes ample attempts to convince the reader otherwise, Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway is a dishonest narrator. The most honest people you meet in your life are usually the ones who remind you over and over again how honest they are, right? I do not know about you, dear reader, but in my experience it is quite the opposite. …show more content…

Although he claims not to have a judgmental bone in his body – surprise, surprise – he readily holds other characters to a standard that casts himself in a better light. For example, Nick describes Tom and Daisy Buchanan as careless, and Jordan Baker as hopelessly dishonest. It is as if he hopes his audience will conveniently misinterpret his hypocrisy, and think of it more as putting others down to make himself look better in an entirely unbiased way. The narrator’s chicanery is furthermore conspicuous with an inspection of the story he tells of his past. He claims descent from a family in the mid-west, and glosses over the fact that the eligible member did not even fight in the war. Instead, he sent a substitute – the most noble and moralistic thing to do in the situation, obviously. Later on in the Carraway saga, Nick leaves home, seemingly with no explanation. Moving from the mid-west to New York City is a pretty radical change, one that would not usually come without just cause. This begs the question, why did Nick really leave home? And moreover, why is he withholding this information? Nick quite possibly may have left out these details because it would inhibit his creation of a façade of

Get Access