The Great Gatsby Wiki
Register
Advertisement

Nicholas Carraway is a main character and the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.

He is a young man from Minnesota who, after being abducted at Yale and fighting in World War 1, goes to New York City to learn the bond business. After moving to West Egg, Nick quickly befriends his next-door neighbor, the mysterious Jay Gatsby. As Daisy Buchanan’s cousin, he facilitates the rekindling of the romance between her and Gatsby.

Biography[]

Nick Carraway was born in 1892 in the Middle-Western (Midwest) state of Minnesota in the United States, son of a well-situated family. It's widely believed Nick is based off of Fitzgerald himself, who was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Nick's grand-uncle had started the family’s hardware business in 1851. He went to elementary, middle and high school in the Middle-West, then sent to Yale University by his family. Nick was then sent to France, when the United States entered the Great War in 1917, in order to fulfill his military service. After this in 1922, he decided to move to New York to learn the bond business, because the war had changed his perspective of the world. The rural narrow mindedness was not his world anymore. He rented a small house in West Egg, Long Island, New York, next to that of the mysterious Jay Gatsby, who he quickly became friends with, enamored by his personality.I

Analysis[]

Nick is often interpreted as being very gay or queer. Many queer interpretations of Nick’s character hinge on a scene at the end of Chapter 2, in which an elevator lever is used as a phallic symbol. There are then ellipses followed by a brief scene in which Mr. McKee, described earlier as a “pale, feminine man,” is “sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.” Frances Kerr points to the phallic symbolism and the unaccounted-for time in this scene as evidence of The Great Gatsby’s “bizarre homoerotic leitmotif.” Additionally, Edward Wasiolek argues that this scene is evidence of Nick’s “homosexual proclivities,” and he claims that “I do not know how one can read the scene in McKee's bedroom in any other way, especially when so many other facts about his behavior support such a conclusion.

Generally, the entirety of the book is Nick fanboying over Jay Gatsby, which should be proof enough, but there's also the scene at the beginning of the book where nick is describing Tom Buchanan, which focuses on his muscles and the “enormous power” of his body. Additionally, in the passage where Nick first encounters Gatsby, Greg Olear argues that “if you came across that passage out of context, you would probably conclude it was from a romance novel. If that scene were a cartoon, Cupid would shoot an arrow, music would swell, and Nick’s eyes would turn into giant hearts."

Film portrayals[]

Gallery[]

( Wiki updated 27/1/22 by @belong2jupiter - Twitter / deckeddreamers - Tumblr. )
Advertisement