The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby Chapter One
TASK 2
How does Fitzgerald further engage the reader’s sympathy for Nick?
Here are some of my ideas to add to your own:
Nick discloses that he is tolerant but sincere enough to admit that his
tolerance ‘has a limit’. At the beginning of the story, Nick, as character
if not as narrator, is presented as having lost patience with the frailties
of his fellows. He has come back from the War with little patience for
‘riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.’
However, intriguingly, one person is ‘exempt from my reaction’ –
paradoxically a man who ‘represented everything for which I have an
unaffected scorn’. We can only assume (increasingly, as we
encounter so many frankly unlikeable characters in the book) that Nick
himself, tolerant though he claims to be, actually envies or at least
aspires to the qualities which mark Gatsby out - ‘. . . something
gorgeous . . . some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life . . .
an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness . . .’
For Nick, it seems, is jaded not only by his experiences in the War but
by the fate which has befallen Gatsby: ‘. . . it is what preyed on
Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that
temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded
elations of men.’
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