How Does Nick Carraway Influence The Great Gatsby

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The main character of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is difficult to determine. The main question that asked is whether it is Jay Gatsby or Nick Carraway. Yes, Gatsby is the titular character, and the character that Fitzgerald seems to be talking about through Nick's eyes, but Nick is more than just a narrator in this story. What the story is really about is how Gatsby's life and the eastern lifestyle affected Nick. A main character is a character that influences the people or events in a story, has a goal, and goes through a change between when the story began and when it ended. The way that Nick influenced the events that transpired in The Great Gatsby isn't immediately obvious, for the simple reason that there was only one major moment that Nick influenced, at least directly. Nick claimed he "reserved all judgement" which is only true in a sense that he did not communicate his judgements often, and being a 'nonjudgmental' person, Nick did not influence many things because he never spoke up about anything; speaking up would mean he had made a judgement. However, …show more content…

There was one major change in Nick—his goal. Nick's initial goal and his changed goal both appear in the same chapter. He said that the Midwest wasn't enough for him anymore. It wasn't the center of the world for him any longer; he wanted more, he wanted excitement, but after spending only three months in New York, he realized that excitement wasn't really what he wanted. In chapter one he stated that after being amongst such immoral people he "wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; [he] wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart." And even when he was most excited by life in the east Nick was dimly aware of the distaste he had for the same morality issues that gave him the excitement he thought he craved, and he said so in the last chapter of the