Nick is particularly taken with Gatsby and considers him a great figure. He sees both the extraordinary quality of hope that Gatsby possesses and his idealistic dream of loving Daisy in a perfect world.
Nick's dislike does not stem from jealousy; it comes from the fact that Gatsby shapes his life around what Daisy wants. Nick does not see Gatsby as a real person, only as an image set out to please Daisy and conform to what she desires.
Even though he disapproves of Gatsby until the end, Nick still winds up taking his side. Nick feels sympathetic toward Gatsby in part because of the relative depravity and despicableness of Tom and Daisy, and also because Gatsby has no other real friends.
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.
Nick is confused and disgusted since he began to see the reality of the delusion and corruption of ethics that they live in (the fact that Tom is openly cheating on his wife and how Jordan is acting like a little girl and gossiping).
Nick is particularly taken with Gatsby and considers him a great figure. He sees both the extraordinary quality of hope that Gatsby possesses and his idealistic dream of loving Daisy in a perfect world.
Carraway is often unconcerned with the women in the novel. His fascination with Gatsby is what truly drives his inclusion in the plot along the way, as Carraway is mostly disinterested in parties and drama.
Tone Nick's attitudes toward Gatsby and Gatsby's story are ambivalent and contradictory. At times he seems to disapprove of Gatsby's excesses and breaches of manners and ethics, but he also romanticizes and admires Gatsby, describing the events of the novel in a nostalgic and elegiac tone.
"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. This is probably Gatsby's single most famous quote.
Why does Nick almost laugh when Gatsby is telling him about his personal history? A: Nick thinks it is funny that Gatsby considers what he went through any kind of hardship.
“You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Nick addresses these words to Gatsby the last time he sees his neighbor alive, in Chapter 8. This moment nicely captures Nick's ambivalent feelings about Gatsby.
In reality, however, Daisy falls far short of Gatsby's ideals. She is beautiful and charming, but also fickle, shallow, bored, and sardonic. Nick characterizes her as a careless person who smashes things up and then retreats behind her money.
Tom Buchanan
Tom, a former football player and Yale graduate, marries Daisy Buchanan shortly after her family forbids her from being with Gatsby. Nick, who went to college with Tom, dislikes him.
Nick puts the matter thus: “[Gatsby] had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
In many ways, Nick is an unreliable narrator: he's dishonest about his own shortcomings (downplaying his affairs with other women, as well as his alcohol use), and he doesn't tell us everything he knows about the characters upfront (for example, he waits until Chapter 6 to tell us the truth about Gatsby's origins, even ...
Nick is the hero because he is representative of the three qualities that Fitzgerald uses to redefine the term: the ability to acknowledge the tact that all things come to an end, the ability to realize the fallacy of the American dream, and the ability to change from an outsider to an insider.
Gatsby is also a classical tragic hero in that he is the victim of forces outside himself – Daisy's carelessness and Tom's hard malice. While one might agree with Daisy that Gatsby asks too much, pathos is still felt at Daisy's abandonment of him and at his lonely death.
The Last Line of The Great Gatsby. The last sentence of this novel is consistently ranked in the lists of best last lines that magazines like to put together. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. So what makes this sentence so great?
“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.” “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.” “It takes two to make an accident.” “He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
Nick calls himself "one of the few honest people that I have ever known" (3.170), but that doesn't mean he's very nice. Nick may be polite and easy to get along with on the outside, but he's not afraid to tell it like it is.
Several notable characters appear in the book, however, the most likable ones are frequently regarded as: Nick Carraway: Many people believe Nick Carraway to be the most virtuous character in this book. He is the only one who expresses worry for Gatsby and is seldom ever seen to enjoy gossip.
He says that Gatsby deserved to die. Nick comes to the conclusion that Tom and Daisy are careless and uncaring people and that they destroy people and things, knowing that their money will shield them from ever having to face any negative consequences.
This is at the very end of the novel. Of the late Gatsby, Tom says, “That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust in your eyes just like he did in Daisy's….” And that's why it matters that Nick is gay and in love with Gatsby: because Tom's assessment is spot-on, but Nick will never admit it.
Relationship 1: Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby. The relationship at the very heart of The Great Gatsby is, of course, Gatsby and Daisy, or more specifically, Gatsby's tragic love of (or obsession with) Daisy, a love that drives the novel's plot.
Nick believes Gatsby's account of his past, which endears Gatsby to Nick and makes Nick trust the man more. The chapter also hints at Gatsby's current, possibly nefarious, business with the introduction of Meyer Wolfsheim. Most importantly, it reveals the past relationship between Gatsby and Nick's cousin, Daisy.