Fortune smiles at Mr Jay Gatsby, the main character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short novel The Great Gatsby. At least that is what Fitzgerald wants us to believe. With clever narrative tricks, Gatsby is portrayed as a man who succeeds in all he does. However, at the end of the novel, Gatsby dies a broken man as a result of his failure to reunite with the woman who has been the motivation for his success. Many factors contribute to the false assumption that Gatsby will succeed in his mission. The choice of narrator, the order in which the events are told and the description of Daisy’s relationship to her husband, among other things. However, the most important factor is Carraway’s partiality to Mr Gatsby, and how Carraway’s feelings towards the characters affect his narrative. This essay will investigate how the novel is designed to mislead, based on the hypothesis that the reader is deceived by Nick Carraway’s way of telling the story. Creating an Illusion –The Subjective Narrator The romantic illusion about Jay Gatsby, an illusion which inclines the reader to believe that Gatsby will be successful in all he does, is created by he narrator of the novel, Nick Carraway. He is an observing character who tells the story of Jay Gatsby’s fate from a subjective point of view. Thus it may be suggested that the narrative is not reliable, if we consider how shallow his relationship to Gatsby and the other characters is. Carraway moves to Long Island in the midst of the events, thus he cannot possibly know what has happened before his arrival; these events are based on the testimony and statements of other characters. He is not omniscient; therefore he cannot supply the reader with the true thoughts and feelings of the others. The novel is thus pervaded by Mr Carraway’s interpretations of what the other characters
