Great Gatsby Reading Blog #1

In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway, the narrator, seems to be the hero of the story. More often than not, the narrator is usually the hero, however, Fitzgerald portrays Nick as a good person with the quote that "[he] is inclined to reserve all judgments" (1). Nick also states that he is shocked by the elaborateness of Catherine's like about Daisy being Catholic, again making him seem like a morally good character (Fitzgerald 33).

Tom seems to be the villain of the novel so far. Daisy describes her husband Tom as "a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen" (Fitzgerald 12), all words with a negative connotation. Daisy also seems to be tied down by Tom, Fitzgerald writing that after Tom left the table something that "quickened" within her, which again paints Tom negatively (14). Not only does he seem to be a brute of a man, Miss Jordan Baker says that he has a mistress in New York, showing that he is being unfaithful to Daisy and again portraying him negatively (Fitzgerald 15). 

Gatsby himself seems to play the role of an antihero, however, based on the first three chapters there cannot be a conclusive classification for him. At the end of chapter 1 after Nick decides to call out to Gatsby, he mysteriously vanishes, giving him an aura of mystery that isn't typical of a hero (Fitzgerald 21). Lucille, Jordan, and an unnamed girl begin gossiping about Gatsby, saying that he "killed a man once" and that he "was a German spy during the war", which is countered by one of the girls saying that "he was in the American army during the war" (Fitzgerald 44). The uncertainty of him being good or bad adds to his aura of mystery and the sense that he may be an antihero.