SOURCE: Cartwright, Kent. “Nick Carraway as an Unreliable Narrator.” Papers on Language and Literature 20, no. 2 (spring 1984): 218-32.

In the following essay, Cartwright discusses ways in which Nick Carraway is sometimes a confused or misleading narrator.

While I have met individuals whom I might describe as more Gatsby than Carraway, I have seldom met a critic I would so describe. As critics, we seem to cherish our disillusionment. Indeed, serious interest in The Great Gatsby, according to Richard Foster, was launched by a generation of neoclassical and formalist critics who tended to believe in the final, tough truth of existence imaged in the thinning possibility and thinning joy of Nick's lugubrious moral retreat. As a consequence, traditional estimates of The Great Gatsby have grown up around the dual assumptions that Nick speaks for his author and that the novel's mission is an essentially straightforward criticism of the American Dream...