The Great Gatsby - Narrators Role in Establishing Theme Essay

The evolving character of an interactive narrator can help discern key themes in a novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald's social examination of life in America's Jazz Age relies heavily on Nick Carraway, the narrator, acting as a 'Trojan horse' for Fitzgerald to smuggle his own ideologies into The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald endorses realist class relations as power relations over the romantic and archaic 'Jeffersonian dream of simple agrarian value'. He also favours the view that the American upper class's 'carpe diem' approach to life placed capitalist society in a moral downwards spiral, instead of conforming to mainstream ideas of the Age such as 'money can buy happiness'. Nick?s statement that people are only ?pursued? (generally the upper classes, being chased due to their lifestyle) or ?pursuing? (chasing the lifestyle of the pursued). These mutually exclusive states mean that Nick believes all the characters with which he interacts can be stratified into one of these two groups, seemingly based on class. The narrator also claims that people can also be ?busy and?tired?. Again, these two vaguer classes cannot exist together. At first examination it may seem that this ?black and white? observation of the members of Gatsby?s America is shortsighted. However at that stage on the novel Nick is entitled to make such a judgement. Immediately after Nick?s thought entered his ?heady? mind, he had just learnt the purpose of ?purposeless splendour? from Jordan: that Gatsby had moved to West Egg to be close to Daisy. This ?pursuing? of Daisy, the ?five years? of busy waiting, is certainly a revelation to the reader, and to Nick. Nick also says that he had forgotten about ?Daisy and Gatsby?, though it still must have played on his subcons... ...towards her old family (?Do they miss me), these all serve to promote Fitzgerald?s endorsed theme of the corruption of the traditional values of the West, and how the ?Money can buy happiness? myth sends society into a downwards spiral. The way that Nick Carraway, as an interactive narrator, relates to different characters (and what they stand for) in the novel conveys the extent to which Fitzgerald endorses or challenges that character?s ideologies. Nick tarnishes all characters with a cynical, stratifying brush in order to smuggle in the main ideologies of the text by creating a pastiche of these themes. Nick?s black-and-white thought of the ?pursuing, the pursued, the busy and the tired? serves to reinforce the contrast of what is endorsed and challenged through the book, via the medium of the narrator?s interaction with different creations of the author.