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Character Analysis Of Nick Carraway In The Great Gatsby

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Nick Carraway is both first-person narrator and character in The Great Gatsby. This allows Nick to take part in the action, while he remains in the background telling the story through his eyes. The first-person narrative may give the reader a sense of emotional directness and identification to the narrator as well as drawing the reader’s attention to the narrator’s specific voice. The story is told in past tense, as Nick is looking back at the events in New York, some years earlier. In the beginning of the novel, Nick seems more like an observer than a main character. At the beginning of the first chapter, Nick tells the reader "I 'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores." He claims that he is a tolerant and non-judgemental person and that attracts many people 's attention, and thus he has had interesting but also uninteresting conversations with men. Later in the chapter he says, "Reserving judgement is a matter of infinite hope". Because of Nick 's personality, people tell him things, however he tries not to judge to quickly, trying to get to know a person 's true character before judging. Nick Carraway is a young man, he turns 30 during the story of the novel and he is born and raised in the Middle West in the US. The reader gets to know a great deal about Nick 's background in the first chapter. He went to college where he was accused of being a politician
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