Nick Carraway

Nick Carraway is a fictional character and narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is a Yale University alumnus from the American Midwest, a World War I veteran, and a newly arrived resident of West Egg on Long Island, near New York City. He is a bond salesman and the neighbor of enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby. He facilitates a sexual affair between Gatsby and Nick's second cousin, once removed, Daisy Buchanan which becomes one of the novel's central conflicts. Carraway is easy-going and optimistic, although this latter quality fades as the novel progresses. After witnessing the callous indifference and insouciant hedonism of the idle rich during the riotous Jazz Age, he ultimately chooses to leave the eastern United States forever and returns to the Midwest.

The character of Nick Carraway has been analyzed by scholars for nearly a century and has given rise to a number of critical interpretations. According to scholarly consensus, Carraway embodies the pastoral idealism of Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald identifies the Midwest—those "towns beyond the Ohio"—with the perceived virtuousness and rustic simplicity of the American West and as culturally distinct from the decadent values of the eastern United States. Carraway's decision to leave the East evinces a tension between a complex pastoral ideal of a bygone America and the societal transformations caused by industrialization. In this context, Nick's repudiation of the East represents a futile attempt to withdraw into nature. Yet, as Fitzgerald's work shows, any technological demarcation between the eastern and western United States has vanished, and one cannot escape into a pastoral past.

Since the 1970s, scholarship has often focused on Carraway's sexuality. In one instance in the novel, Carraway departs an orgy with a feminine man and—following suggestive ellipses—next finds himself standing beside a bed while the man sits between the sheets clad only in his underwear. Such passages have led scholars to describe Nick as possessing a queerness and prompted analyses about his attachment to Gatsby. For these reasons, the novel has been described as an exploration of sexual identity during a historical era typified by the societal transition towards modernity.

The character has appeared in various media related to the novel, including stage plays, radio shows, television episodes, and feature films. Actor Ned Wever originated the role of Nick on the stage when he starred in the 1926 Broadway adaptation of Fitzgerald's novel at the Ambassador Theatre in New York City. That same year, screen actor Neil Hamilton played the role in the now lost 1926 silent film adaptation. In subsequent decades, the role has been played by many actors including Macdonald Carey, Lee Bowman, Rod Taylor, Sam Waterston, Paul Rudd, Bryan Dick, Tobey Maguire and others.

Inspiration for the character
Fitzgerald based the character of Nick Carraway largely upon himself. The author was a young Midwesterner from Minnesota. Like Carraway who went to Yale, Fitzgerald attended Princeton, an Ivy League school. Whereas Nick's father owns a hardware store, Fitzgerald's father owned a furniture store in Minnesota until 1898. Many scholars, including Fitzgerald's close friend Edmund Wilson, posit that Fitzgerald created the character of Nick as an ideal version of himself. His "characters—and himself—are actors in an elfin harlequinade".

Nick's Midwestern viewpoint reflects Fitzgerald's experience. According to his friend Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald was "as much of the Middle West of large cities and country clubs" as fellow writer Sinclair Lewis was "of the Middle West of the prairies and little towns". Wilson ascribed to Fitzgerald many of the strengths and weaknesses typical of 1920s Midwesterners including a "sensitivity and eagerness for life without a sound base of culture and taste".

Wilson posited that Fitzgerald's Midwestern identity informed much of Carraway's perceptions; in particular, when Fitzgerald "approaches the East, he brings to it the standards of the wealthy West—the preoccupation with display, the love of magnificence and jazz, the vigorous social atmosphere of amiable flappers and youths comparatively unpoisoned as yet by the snobbery of the East".

When creating the literary character of Carraway, Fitzgerald originally named the character Dud. In earlier drafts of the novel, the character had a previous romance with Daisy Buchanan prior to their reunion on Long Island. Fitzgerald's later rewrites excised any romantic past between Nick and Daisy, as well as added and then deleted a passage implying that Nick departed a job after a male acquaintance amorously pursued him. He also changed the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator to Nick's subjective perspective. These alterations introduced considerable ambiguity regarding both Nick's reliability as a narrator and his sexuality which became the focus of later scholarship.

The ambiguity of Nick's sexuality reflects a similar ambiguity regarding Fitzgerald's own sexuality. During his lifetime, Fitzgerald's sexuality became a subject of debate among his friends and acquaintances. As a youth, Fitzgerald had a close relationship with Father Sigourney Fay, a possibly gay Catholic priest, and Fitzgerald later used his last name for the idealized romantic character of Daisy Fay. After college, Fitzgerald cross-dressed during outings in Minnesota, and he flirted with other men at social events.

Years later, while drafting The Great Gatsby, rumors dogged Fitzgerald among the American expat community in Paris that he was gay. Soon after, Fitzgerald's wife Zelda Sayre likewise doubted his heterosexuality and asserted that he was a closeted homosexual. She belittled him with homophobic slurs, and she alleged that Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway engaged in sexual relations. These incidents strained the Fitzgeralds' marriage at the time of the novel's publication.

Although Fitzgerald's sexuality remains a subject of scholarly debate, such biographical details lent credence to interpretations by literary scholars that his fictional characters such as Nick Carraway, Jordan Baker and others are either gay or bisexual surrogates. Scholars have particularly focused on Fitzgerald's statement in a 1935 letter to acquaintance Laura Guthrie that his mind was "half feminine". Although born "masculine," Fitzgerald nonetheless stated that he was "half feminine—at least my mind is... Even my feminine characters are feminine Scott Fitzgeralds."

Fictional character biography
In his narration, Nick Carraway explains that he was born in the Midwestern United States, a region which he describes as "the ragged edge of the universe". The Carraway family owned a hardware business since 1851 and have been a prominent, well-to-do family for generations. Due to his privileged upbringing, Carraway's father cautioned him against passing judgment on individuals who did not enjoy the same advantages. After his matriculation from Yale University in 1915 and the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, Nick served in the Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion of the 3rd Division.

After the Allied Powers signed an armistice with Imperial Germany in 1918, a restless Nick moved from the Midwest to West Egg, a wealthy enclave on Long Island, to learn about the bond business. He lives across the bay from his affluent second cousin, once removed, Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom Buchanan, formerly Nick's classmate at Yale. They introduce him to their cynical friend Jordan Baker, a masculine golf champion and heiress. Jordan and Nick embark upon an exploratory romance, although Carraway describes his interest in Jordan Baker as not love but "a sort of tender curiosity".

Soon after, Nick's wealthy neighbor Jay Gatsby invites him to one of his lavish soirées, replete with famous guests and hot jazz music. Nick is intrigued by the enigmatic millionaire, especially when Gatsby introduces him to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish gangster who is rumored to have been behind the Black Sox Scandal, the fixing the World Series in 1919 and helped Gatsby make his fortune in the bootlegging business. Gatsby confesses to Nick that he has been in love with Daisy since the war and that his extravagant lifestyle is an attempt to win her affections. He asks Nick for his help in seducing her and Nick invites Daisy over to his house without telling her that Gatsby will be there. When Gatsby and Daisy resume their love affair, Nick serves as their confidant.

Several months later, Tom discovers the affair when Daisy addresses Gatsby with unabashed intimacy in front of him. After a confrontation at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Gatsby and Daisy leave together in his car. Nick later learns that Daisy struck and killed George's wife and Tom's lover, Myrtle Wilson, in Gatsby's car. Tom informs George that Gatsby had been driving the car. George kills Gatsby and then himself. Nick holds a funeral for Gatsby and breaks up with Jordan.

Nick now loathes New York City and decides that Gatsby, Daisy, Tom and he were all Midwesterners unsuited to Eastern life. Nick encounters Tom and initially refuses to shake his hand. Tom admits he told George that Gatsby owned the vehicle that killed Myrtle. Before returning to the Midwest, Nick returns to Gatsby's mansion and stares across the bay at the green light emanating from the end of Daisy's dock.

Unreliable narrator
Since the 1960s, critics have drawn attention to Nick Carraway's status as first an observer and then as a participant raising questions about his reliability as narrator. As the narrator of the story, other characters are presented as Carraway perceives them, and he directs the reader's sympathies.

In 1966, critic Gary Scrimgeour argued in Criticism magazine that the narrator's unreliability perhaps indicated Fitzgerald's confusion about the novel's plot, while critic Charles Wild Walcutt posited in the same year that Nick's narrative unreliability is intentional, and critic Thomas Boyle argued in 1969 that Nick's unreliability is an integral part of the novel.

Although Carraway proclaims himself to be "one of the few honest people that I have ever known," critics observe that he is shallow, confused, hypocritical, and immoral. He says little about a previous marital engagement and his wartime experience; both of which are first raised by other characters.

Lost Generation
Despite the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald rejected Gertrude Stein's conception of a so-called "lost generation" affected by the horrors of World War I, a number of literary scholars nonetheless posit that Carraway's observations typify the disillusioned Lost Generation. These scholars speculate that Carraway's journey eastward is "not simply to learn the bond business, but because his wartime experiences have left him restless in his midwestern hometown and because he wishes to make a clean break" from the past and its traumas.

Scholar Jeffrey Steinbrink observes that veterans such as Carraway viewed pre-war America as "not simply remote, but archaic, the repository of an innocence long since dead. Possessed of what seemed an irrelevant past, Americans faced an inaccessible future; for a moment in our history there was only the present." Critic Edmund Wilson opined that such disillusioned persons regard civilization as "a contemptible farce of the futile and the absurd; the world of finance, the army, and finally, the world of business are successively and casually exposed as completely without dignity or point. The inference is that, in such a civilization, the sanest and most creditable thing is to forget organized society and live for the jazz of the moment."

Although scholars such as Steinbrink and others cite the carnage of World War I with disillusioning younger Americans and spawning the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald rejected such causal arguments. Instead Fitzgerald argued that younger Americans only became disillusioned after witnessing how police officers treated peaceful veterans returning from World War I. He claimed that the excessive use of force by police officers against demobilized war veterans during the 1919 May Day Riots triggered a wave of cynicism among younger Americans who questioned whether the United States was any better than despotic regimes in Europe and whether the war had been ultimately meaningless. Due to this resulting cynicism proliferating among American youth, Fitzgerald argued that the defining characteristic of younger Americans during the raucous Jazz Age was political apathy.

In his famous 1931 essay "Echoes of the Jazz Age", Fitzgerald noted that the younger American generation which embodied the Jazz Age zeitgeist was not the Lost Generation—to which he and Ernest Hemingway belonged —but their precocious younger peers who had been adolescent during World War I. These younger persons, whose libertine men and women would be later described by newspapers as "sheiks" and "flappers," became the true hedonistic luminaries of the era, and the older Lost Generation merely imitated the wild behavior of their younger siblings.

Pastoralism
Throughout the novel, Carraway identifies the Midwest—those "towns beyond the Ohio"—with the perceived virtuousness and rustic simplicity of the American West and as culturally distinct from the decadence of the eastern United States. Fitzgerald biographer Andrew Turnbull notes that "in those days the contrasts between East and West, between city and country, between prep school and high school were more marked than they are now, and correspondingly the nuances of dress and manners were more noticeable".

Nick ultimately returns to the Midwest after despairing of the decadence and indifference of the East. Scholar Thomas Hanzo posits that Carraway must return "to the comparatively rigid morality of his ancestral West and to its embodiment in the manners of Western society. He alone of all the Westerners can return, since the others have suffered, apparently beyond any conceivable redemption, a moral degeneration brought on by their meeting with that form of Eastern society which developed during the Twenties."

Similarly, scholar Jeffrey Steinbrink argues that "the roar of the Twenties was both a birth-cry and a death-rattle for, if it announced the arrival of the first generation of modern Americans, it also declared an end to the Jeffersonian dream of simple agrarian virtue as the standard of national conduct and the epitome of national aspiration. The new generation forfeited its claim to the melioristic certainties of an earlier time as the price of its full participation in the twentieth century".

In 1964, historian and literary critic Leo Marx argued in The Machine in the Garden that Nick Carraway's decision to return to the Midwest in the novel evinces a tension between a complex pastoral ideal of a bygone America and the societal transformations caused by industrialization and machine technology.

Marx argues that Fitzgerald, via Nick Carraway, expresses a pastoral longing typical of other 1920s American writers like William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Although such writers cherish the pastoral ideal, they accept that technological progress has deprived this ideal of nearly all meaning. In this context, Nick's repudiation of the eastern United States represents a futile attempt to withdraw into nature. Yet, as Fitzgerald's work shows, any technological demarcation between the eastern and western United States has long since vanished, and one cannot escape into a pastoral past.

Queer reading
As early as 1945, literary critics such as Lionel Trilling noted that various characters in The Great Gatsby were intended by Fitzgerald to be "vaguely homosexual" and in 1960, writer Otto Friedrich commented upon the ease of examining Nick Carraway's thwarted relations through a queer lens.

By the 1970s, scholarship increasingly focused on Carraway's sexuality. Scholars focus on a passage in which Carraway departs an orgy with a feminine man and—following discussion about an elevator lever and suggestive ellipses—next finds himself standing beside a bed while the man sits between the sheets clad only in his underwear. Such passages have led scholars to describe Nick as possessing a queerness and prompted analyses about his attachment to Gatsby. For these reasons, the novel has been described as an exploration of sexual identity during a historical era typified by the societal transition towards modernity.

Other indications of Carraway's possible homosexuality stem from a comparison of his descriptions of men and women within the novel. For example, the greatest compliment that Nick gives Daisy is that she has a "low, thrilling voice", and his description of Jordan emphasizes her masculine qualities. Conversely, Nick's description of Tom focuses on his muscles and the "enormous power" of his body, and in the passage where Nick first encounters Gatsby, writer Greg Olear argues that "if you came across that passage out of context, you would probably conclude it was from a romance novel. If that scene were a cartoon, Cupid would shoot an arrow, music would swell, and Nick's eyes would turn into giant hearts."

Different scholars draw disparate conclusions regarding the importance of Nick's sexuality to the novel. Greg Olear argues that Nick idealizes Gatsby in a similar way to how Gatsby idealizes Daisy, whereas Fitzgerald scholar Tracy Fessenden posits that Nick's attraction to Gatsby serves to contrast the love story between Gatsby and Daisy. In the eyes of the scholar Joseph Vogel, "a strong case can be made that the most compelling story of unrequited love—in both the novel and the film—is not between Jay Gatsby and Daisy, but between Nick and Jay Gatsby."

Other scholars and writers disagree with such interpretations. Matthew J. Bolton dismisses interpretations of Nick's homosexuality as a case of what narratologists call "overreading." Writer Michael Bourne believes whether or not Carraway is gay "can't be proven one way or the other—but I suspect the queer readings of Carraway say more about the way we read now than they do about Nick or The Great Gatsby." American novelist Steve Erickson, writing in Los Angeles magazine, states that Carraway's fascination with Gatsby is less of his being in love with Gatsby than "Carraway, back from the war and back from the Midwest and wanting nothing more than to be Gatsby himself".

Stage
The first actor to portray Nick Carraway in any medium was 24-year-old Ned Wever who starred in the 1926 Broadway adaptation of Fitzgerald's novel at the Ambassador Theatre in New York City. The play was directed by future motion picture auteur George Cukor. The production delighted audiences and garnered rave reviews from theater critics.

The play ran for 112 performances and paused when its lead actor James Rennie, who portrayed Jay Gatsby, traveled to the United Kingdom to visit an ailing family member. As F. Scott Fitzgerald was vacationing in Europe at the time, he never saw the 1926 Broadway play, but his agent Harold Ober sent him telegrams quoting the glowing reviews of the production. The success of the 1926 Broadway play led to the 1926 film adaptation by director Herbert Brenon.

Film
Many actors have portrayed Nick Carraway in cinematic adaptations of Fitzgerald's novel. The first cinematic adaptation of The Great Gatsby was a silent film produced in 1926 and featured Neil Hamilton as Nick. Reviewers praised Neil Hamilton's portrayal of Carraway, but F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald purportedly loathed the 1926 film adaptation and walked out midway through a viewing of the film at a theater. "We saw The Great Gatsby at the movies," Zelda later wrote to an acquaintance, "It's ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left." The film is now considered lost.

In 1949, a second cinematic adaptation was undertaken starring Macdonald Carey as Nick. In contrast to the 1926 adaptation, the 1949 adaptation was filmed under the strictures of the Hollywood Production Code, and the novel's plot was altered to appease Production Code Administration censors. Critic Lew Sheaffer wrote in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle that Carey acquitted himself well as Gatsby's only friend. Boyd Martin of The Courier-Journal opined that Carey gave a quiet and reserved performance.

In 1974, Sam Waterston portrayed Nick in the third cinematic adaptation. The film received poor critical reviews, but Waterson's performance garnered positive reviews. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that "Waterston is splendid as Nick, the narrator, a role that might have looked like a tour guide's except for the fact that Waterston has the presence and weight as an actor to give it a kind of moral heft." Similarly, Gene Siskel noted "Waterston brings the proper mixture of halting action and determined thinking to his portrayal of Nick. He alone distinguishes The Great Gatsby from so many elephantine Hollywood productions."

In 2013, Tobey Maguire portrayed Nick in the fourth cinematic adaptation. In director Baz Luhrmann's 2013 adaptation, Carraway is depicted as a mental patient inside a sanitarium where he has taken to writing as a form of psychiatric therapy. According to Maguire, the decision to confine Nick in a sanitarium occurred during pre-production as a collaborative idea between himself, director Baz Luhrmann, and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce. Critic Jonathan Romney of The Independent opined that Tobey Maguire as Carraway was the least impressive of the cast, and he lamented that Luhrmann's adaptation disappointingly painted the character as "a straw-hatted goof."

Television
Lee Bowman portrayed Nick in a 1955 episode of the television series Robert Montgomery Presents adapting The Great Gatsby. Reviewers felt Bowman was given little to do with the role and observed the actor "made as much out of the cousin [Nick] as was available." Three years later, Rod Taylor played Nick in a 1958 episode of the television series Playhouse 90.

Paul Rudd played Nick in the 2000 television adaptation. Produced on a limited budget, the 2000 television adaptation greatly suffered from low production values. This TV adaptation received overwhelmingly negative reviews, although Paul Rudd's performance received praise.

Radio
In October 2008, the BBC World Service broadcast an abridged 10-part reading of the story, read from the view of Nick Carraway by Trevor White. In 2012, Bryan Dick played Carraway in a two-part BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial production.