in the great gatsby

why nick? fitzgerald could have chosen any perspective for his novel, but he chose first person narration, and he developed nick carraway. why? based on what you’ve read so far, what do you think nick’s role is? what is fitzgerald suggesting through nick’s narration? can we trust nick?

Personally, I feel that Nick is a character who (as he mentioned in the beginning of the novel) tries to abstain from judging others. This allows readers to gain as impartial (unbiased) of a judgement as one could hope to obtain from a time period so clearly corrupted by intoxication, wealth, and deceiving beauty. He likely chose first person to capture the time period more interestingly, convincingly, and realistically to depict the 1920s in up and coming New York from a person who was living in such a diverse area. I believe that Nick's role is to expose the masks that everyone around his wore throughout life to be accepted by society and to flaunt their superiority when deep down, material objects and liqueur could not make them happy or escape their harsh realities and they were all keeping their own secrets. Fitzgerald may be suggesting through Nick's narration that Nick (although not flawless) is more innocent than his peers and sees the error in their ways, as he is disgusted with the behavior of the affluent characters in East Egg after he lives there beside Gatsby and is eventually encouraged to move back to his former location in West Egg to be surrounded by more ambitious and kindhearted individuals who did not take their possessions for granted because they earned them. So, due to his rather credible stance, I believe that a reader can trust Nick to at least give the most accurate representation of the characters and the "roaring" era that could be feasibly made available. Of course, he knows wealth so he does depict certain areas such as the Valley of Ashes in which Myrtle (Tom's mistress) and Mr. Wilson's residence as being lowly and desolate, but other than some slightly opinionated accounts of geographical locations and mannerisms of the characters, Nick generally abstains from providing much other input about what he witnesses but rather just relays the details for how truly grotesque the lives of those in those cities actually were back then.