Question

In the Great Gatsby, does the narrator (Nick) redeem himself at the end of the novel when he renounces the lavish lifestyle and returns home?

Answer 1

In The Great Gatsby, Nick is constantly in a struggle between admiring the lavish lifestyles of the rich of New York, and hating the superficiality and fakeness that comes with these. This ambivalence is a source of tension throughout the story.

However, towards the end of the novel, Myrtle's death, Gatsby's murder, and everybody's reactions to the events finally convince Nick that this lifestyle is a selfish, rotten one. He decides he wants nothing to do with it anymore, and decides to return home. By taking these actions, Nick is finally able to redeem himself, as he is able to establish that he is a different character from everyone else, and that he values more important things.

Answer 2

The narrator trys to redeem himself after being living a life style that, even though he had always admired rich and powerful people, once he gets into that context of lavish lifestyle, he realized that he did not like the excessive luxuries, the betrayals and the values that people had in this context. He got so dissapointed of this reality that he had experienced, that he returns home in order to get rid of all this matters that did not let him enjoy his life.

He redeems him self because once he returns home because he gets free of all this suffering and dissapointment that he has been experiencing in this life context full of excesses and lack of good values and codes between people.