Who Is An Unreliable Narrator In The Great Gatsby

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Picture this: You’re at a nice dinner party, you don’t know any of the people there; an old family friend dragged you along. Everything is going great; you’ve spent the whole night listening to the adventures of the rich and famous over glasses of champagne. Suddenly everything starts to go quiet and you realize why. You’re family friend and his girlfriend started fighting. Extremely loudly. One quip after another, each more biting than the last, you’re friends face suddenly turns as red as a tomato and his arm flashes out in front of him like lightning. The sound echoes and his girlfriend is now clutching her face while everyone looks dumbly upon them. What would you do? If it were Nick Carraway in that situation, he wouldn’t do a damn thing.…show more content…
However, in some select works of fiction, we happen upon the phenomenon of the Unreliable Narrator. An Unreliable Narrator is just a regular narrator whose credibility is seriously lacking. Their facts tend to contradict each other or facts can change as the story progresses. For example, when Nick first gets to know Gatsby, he thinks he’s a liar and even a little bit sinister. “He looked at me sideways- and I knew why Jordan Baker had believe he was lying…. I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him after all.” (Page 65) In the beginning Nick doesn’t trust Gatsby because he’s a liar (a bad one at that) and then in the end (on page 2, which actually takes place after the story), “On Gatsby… was exempt from my reaction.” His reaction being scorn for the rich. He was so distrustful originally, rightfully so because he was blatantly lying to him and everyone they knew but then he makes him out to be the victim or even someone holy. (“He was the son of God” on page 98.) He’s changing facts about Gatsby because it serves him see Gatsby as a victim. Nick wants to be seen as the good man who stood by the poor martyr so that people would think Nick is some saint. But really, Nick just wanted to peer into the lives of the affluent, never really caring about

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