Victimisation In The Great Gatsby Essay

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Arthur Miller posed a pertinent question in his play, which Proctor asks “Is the accuser always holy now?” It would be apt to replace accuser with narrator when we apply it to Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ or maybe even to allow the original form, for in effect, Nick Carraway does seem to be accusing all the other characters through his narrative. This jazz-aged masterpiece is one side of a story, by a man who from the very beginning of the novel, when he relates a piece of advice which his father gave him, till the very end, with his reflection upon Gatsby’s life, loads his story with self-proclamations, opinions, emotions and all these from a certain degree of distance from every character. This paper attempts to analyze all possible ways …show more content…

He seems to have rigid ideals of right and wrong, which he applies to every other character, but makes exceptions for his own self. This dehumanization of others stems from a certain degree of distance between him and every character. While he socializes with the Buchanans, Gatsby and Jordan Baker, he is nowhere on an emotional parallel to them. If we were to only consider his relationship with Gatsby whom he seems to ‘accuse’ throughout the novel, we notice that while there may be certain exchanges between the two which appeared genuine, they always lacked a two-way element. Such was the only compliment that Nick ever gave Gatsby with nothing but a smile in return: “They’re a rotten crowd... You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together” . The only mutuality they met at was Daisy and that too begun not out of a genuine wish of Gatsby to confide in Nick, but rather Nick being the only gateway to Daisy. In fact in what was probably their longest, exclusive encounter when Gatsby picked Nick up in his car, the conversation consisted of a bunch of lies regarding Gatsby’s background. Nick was never able to break the wall that each character had built to protect their own self and if he had never really known the deepest convictions of characters, his judgements of their acts are rather

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