Unreliable Narration in The Great Gatsby

UNRELIABLE NARRATION IN THE GREAT GATSBY Thomas E. Boyle Thomas E. Boyle (A.B., University of Richmond; M.A., Ph.D., University of Illinois) has taught at the University of Illinois and at Albion College and is presently an associate professor of English at Colorado State College. He has published articles on Whitman, Melville, and Thomas Wolfe in Discourse and in Modern Fiction Studies and is currently at work on a critical biography of Loren Eiseley for the Twayne United States Authors Series. I know you will accept my remarks in the spirit in which they are offered—arrogance. I wish it didn't have to be this way, but in what other spirit can I tell you how to read a novel you have already read? It is unlikely that we will ever agree even on the standard by which The Great Gatsby or any other literary work is to be judged. This novel, for example, has been interpreted as if it were metaphysics, sociology, and intellectual history. One would never know from much that is written on Gatsby that it is an aesthetic object (or better—process) standing, as Eliot said of the poem, somewhere between the author and the reader. The more critics I read the more convinced I become that standards are to literary criticism what faith is to religion. My argument, however, is neither a lament over the diversity of critical frames of reference, nor a plea for critical ecumenicalism. The warring factions among critics are, to me, a testament to the depth and the differences of human perception. My argument, or article of faith, is that the understanding of a novel, the obverse of which is aesthetic pleasure, is most meaningfully achieved through an analysis of words, sounds, rhythms, and ideas—that which the novel is. The meaning such an analysis yields is the rhetoric of fiction, a phrase which, of course, brings to mind that brilliant and seminal book by Wayne C. Booth. The idea in Booth's volume germane to The Great Gatsby is his concept of "distance," "distance" between the author's perception, or more accurately, the norms of the novel, and the perception of the narrator; or, to put it another way, the "distance" between the narrator's perception and the reader's perception. If this "distance" exists we have, to some degree , an unreliable narrator, and critics, as well as students, are reluctant to recognize this device since unreliable narrators, as Booth says, "make stronger demands on the reader's powers of inference than reliable narrators do." Although he makes only cursory reference to The Great Gatsby, Booth draws two conclusions, both of which, I submit, are wrong. He asserts that Nick has only a minor involvement in the events of the novel and that he "provides thoroughly reliable guidance." A more extensive treatment of Booth's methodology is found in "The Triple Vision of Nick Carraway" by E. Fred Carlisle in the Winter 1965-66 issue of Modem Fiction Studies. Carlisle corroborates Booth's error by judging Nick's perception as "mature [and] informed." 22RMMLA BulletinMarch 1969 While my view of Nick Carraway is new, it is not original. In 1966 there appeared independently two studies remarkably similar in evidence cited and identical in conclusions reached: "Against The Great Gatsby" by Gary Scrimgeour in the Autumn 1966 issue of Criticism and the Thirteenth chapter of Man's Changing Masks by Charles Child Walcutt. Scrimgeour sees the narrator's unreliability as a mark of Fitzgerald's confusion; Walcutt sees it as part of the novel's mystery. Rather than summarize, I refer you to these sources which examine the disparity between what Nick says and what he does, and conclude that far from providing "thoroughly reliable guidance," the narrator is shallow, confused, hypocritical, and immoral. If this view of Carraway is correct, the bulk of forty years of Gatsby criticism attests to our having been taken in by Carraway in somewhat the same way that Carraway has been taken in by Gatsby. A hypothesis so startling and so provocative cries out for further exploration. In short, I have tried to see Nick's unreliability as an integral part of...