To What Extent Does Nick Carraway Evolve In "the Great Gatsby"?

Nick Carraway's moral evolution is thematically pertinent to the plot progression of "The Great Gatsby". His narration reflects his moral status; aiming to maintain a rescued fragment of events and reliability. Nick successfully engages the sympathies of the reader, preventing any single preconceptions.

The narrative scheme of The Great Gatsby contains many parallels with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Both novels begin with a young narrator, who out of a mood of aimlessness and wonderment, embarks on a journey in which fundamental truths of the human condition are learnt. Nick appears fretful at the moral confinements of the post-war Midwest:

"Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe-so I decided to go East and learn the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man"

Nick serves as the novels' source of moral guidance. At the start of the novel, his gestures and judgements mark him as a character of moral integrity; he states that he is "full of interior rules that act as brakes". Nick's supposition that the bond business "could support one more single man" posits his antediluvian mentality. A Marxist critic would recognise the voracious malevolent force of Capitalism, which removes the agrarian idyll of the Midwest as "warm centre of the world". Yet Nick's Adamic sentiments are offset by the acknowledgement of his partial corruption by the East; demonstrating a hardy cynicism. He is therefore a dichotomous figure; his hindsight lends him an aphoristic wisdom that indicates he is unable to fully assimilate the reality of his surroundings: "life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all". His retreat into nostalgia is indicative of Fitzgerald's own Modernist notions; that the linear decline of American society corresponds with the quest for material wealth and the resulting spiritual poverty, prevalent in the "Jazz Age".

Moreover, Nick exhibits misanthropic notions, suggesting that he is influenced by the moral vacuum that Fitzgerald perceived to have engulfed American traditions:

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart."

Nick's journey eastwards shows him the carelessness of the wealthy; whether it be the squalid carelessness of the Buchanans or the unrealistic splendour of Gatsby. The use of the militaristic lexis "uniform" disapprovingly aligns the war with the crass attitudes typical of New York, a key theme featuring in his earlier work "Tales of the Jazz Age". "The riotous excursions" are rebuffed, in place of the longing for an older, more humane America. Nick's mention that Gatsby "represented everything for which I have unaffected scorn"; delineates Nick as a realistic, sympathetic, and moral personality. Although he has an apparent attraction to wealth; "the consoling proximity of millionaires", Nick's allusion to a "rather hard-boiled painting" serves to emphasise his values of honesty and pragmatism. Nick reveals he feels "inadequate around Daisy"; whose conspicuous leisure and consumption marks her, in contrast to Nick's relative material asceticism and upholding of morals, as a member of Veblen's leisure class.

Nick becomes disenchanted with the conflation of the heroic idealism and meretricious vulgarity of the Buchanans. His experiences are metonymic of the actions of upper echelons of the period, a time characterised by appalling labour disputes, unbalanced conservatism and selfish isolationism:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness"

A Russian Formalist criticism would highlight the bestial and aggressive language: the past tense of "smashed" and "retreated" infers that their cruel behaviour is to expected, and is rife amongst the "staid nobility of the countryside". Fitzgerald, who established himself as a spokesperson for the decade following his first successful publication of "This Side of Paradise"; described the period as "a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure". But Nick remains as a prosaic narrator and motivated largely by what can be described as Jeremy Bentham's theory of altruistic hedonism; suggesting that albeit tentatively, Nick is selflessness, and that he believes that there is more to living than the self. His progressively searching belief for the numinous upholds his candour and honest virtues.

Although Nick's attempt to embrace what he ultimately views as moral decadence; he is unable to find fulfilment in the surrounding fractiousness. Despite his relationships, Nick remains as solitary at the end of the novel as at the beginning; inferring a dark social didacticism:

"Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on."

This shows Nick's hypocrisy; he also states that he is "inclined to reserve all judgements". A psychoanalytic reading of the passage shows Nick's repressed emotions to manifest themselves as frustration and loss of inhibition : "I don't care". He is unable to engage in emotional interflow as he fails to understand its wider significance as a tool of politesse. Alarmingly, Nick's melancholy beliefs may be perfectly attuned to Fitzgerald's - by acting as an authorial mouthpiece, he mirrors Fitzgerald's lapse in Catholicism. His stoical cynicism is founded from his experiences, from which it is surmised that he has felt limited moral development.

Therefore, Nick's final moral state is ambiguous; his weltanschauung is that of a fruitful ambivalence. As a homodiegetic narrator, Nick seems wearily resigned to the predominant cultural dilemma grasping America; seeing it is as a failure to reconcile impractical idealisms. His retreat back to Wisconsin shows his increasingly amoral self-motivation; his return West is not a return to rural innocence but due to a bleak distrust of societal solidarity