Unreliable narrator Since the 1960s, critics have drawn attention to Nick Carraway's status as first an observer and then as a participant, questioning his reliability as narrator. He says little about a previous marital engagement and his wartime experience; both of which are first raised by other characters.
Lost Generation 's
Lost Generation. Fitzgerald rejected Stein's characterization of war veterans as a "lost generation". Pictured above: American
doughboys during the
Meuse-Argonne offensive, 1918 Despite the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald rejected
Gertrude Stein's characterization of
World veterans as a so-called "
lost generation" set adrift by the horrors of the conflict, Fitzgerald publicly dismissed Gertrude Stein's view that the veterans were a "lost generation" and expressed confidence in their resilience and fortitude. Fitzgerald believed that the American generation that embodied the Jazz Age's hedonism wasn't the veterans but their
younger peers who had been adolescents during the war. "The generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way," Fitzgerald explained. "This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as
flappers". Fitzgerald viewed this post-war generation to be "essentially weak," lacking vitality, and devoid of moral standards. This younger generation was best described in fiction by novels such as
The Plastic Age and
Flaming Youth. Declaring that "the war had little or nothing to do" with the change in morals among young Americans or the emergence of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald attributed the
sexual revolution among young Americans to a combination of popular literary works by
H. G. Wells and other intellectuals criticizing repressive social norms,
Sigmund Freud's sexual theories gaining salience, and the invention of the automobile allowing youths to escape parental surveillance in order to engage in
premarital sex. Fitzgerald further argued that young Americans became disillusioned after witnessing how police treated peaceful veterans returning from World . He claimed that the
excessive use of force by police against war veterans during the
1919 May Day Riots triggered a wave of cynicism among young Americans who questioned whether the United States was any better than despotic regimes in Europe. Because of this growing cynicism among American youth, Fitzgerald claimed that the defining characteristic of young Americans during the Jazz Age was political apathy. Critic
Edmund Wilson opined that these young Americans regarded civilization as "a contemptible farce of the futile and the absurd; the world of finance, the army, and finally, the world of business are successively and casually exposed as completely without dignity or point. The inference is that, in such a civilization, the sanest and most creditable thing is to forget organized society and live for the jazz of the moment."
Pastoral idealism of Fitzgerald who cherished the rustic simplicity of the
American Midwest. Throughout the novel, Carraway identifies the
Midwest—those "towns beyond
the Ohio"—with the perceived virtuousness and rustic simplicity of the
American West and as culturally distinct from the decadence of the
eastern United States. Fitzgerald biographer
Andrew Turnbull notes that "in those days the contrasts between
East and
West, between city and country, between prep school and high school were more marked than they are now, and correspondingly the nuances of dress and manners were more noticeable". At the end of the novel, Nick ultimately returns to the Midwest after despairing of the decadence and indifference of the East. Scholar Thomas Hanzo posits that Carraway must return "to the comparatively rigid morality of his ancestral West and to its embodiment in the manners of Western society. He alone of all the Westerners can return, since the others have suffered, apparently beyond any conceivable redemption, a moral degeneration brought on by their meeting with that form of Eastern society which developed during the Twenties." Similarly, scholar Jeffrey Steinbrink argues that "the Twenties was both a birth-cry and a death-rattle for, if it announced the arrival of the first generation of modern Americans, it also declared an end to the Jeffersonian dream of simple agrarian virtue as the standard of national conduct and the epitome of national aspiration. The new generation forfeited its claim to the melioristic certainties of an earlier time as the price of its full participation in the twentieth century". In 1964, historian and literary critic
Leo Marx argued in
The Machine in the Garden that Nick Carraway's decision to return to the Midwest in the novel evinces a tension between a complex
pastoral ideal of a bygone America and the societal transformations caused by
industrialization and
machine technology. Marx argues that Fitzgerald, via Nick Carraway, expresses a pastoral longing typical of other 1920s American writers like
William Faulkner and
Ernest Hemingway. Although such writers cherish the pastoral ideal, they accept that technological progress has deprived this ideal of nearly all meaning. In this context, Nick's repudiation of the eastern United States represents a futile attempt to withdraw into nature. These analyses often focus on a passage where Carraway departs an orgy with a feminine man and—following discussion about an elevator lever and suggestive ellipses—next finds himself standing beside a bed while the man sits between the sheets clad only in his underwear. Such passages have led scholars to describe Nick as possessing a
queerness and prompted analyses about his attachment to Gatsby. For these reasons, scholars describe the novel as an exploration of
sexual identity during a historical period marked by society's transition to
modernity. Other indications of Carraway's possible homosexuality stem from a comparison of his descriptions of men and women. For example, the greatest compliment that Nick gives Daisy is that she has a "low, thrilling voice", and his description of Jordan emphasizes her masculine qualities. Conversely, Nick's description of Tom focuses on his muscles and the "enormous power" of his body, and in the passage where Nick first encounters Gatsby, writer
Greg Olear argues that "if you came across that passage out of context, you would probably conclude it was from a romance novel. If that scene were a cartoon,
Cupid would shoot an arrow, music would swell, and Nick's eyes would turn into giant hearts." Different scholars draw disparate conclusions regarding the importance of Nick's sexuality to the novel. Greg Olear argues that Nick idealizes Gatsby in a similar way to how Gatsby idealizes Daisy, whereas Fitzgerald scholar Tracy Fessenden posits that Nick's attraction to Gatsby serves to contrast the love story between Gatsby and Daisy. In the eyes of the scholar Joseph Vogel, "a strong case can be made that the most compelling story of unrequited love—in both the novel and
the film—is not between Jay Gatsby and Daisy, but between Nick and Jay Gatsby." Other scholars and writers disagree with such interpretations. Matthew J. Bolton dismisses interpretations of Nick's homosexuality as a case of what narratologists call "overreading." Writer Michael Bourne believes whether or not Carraway is gay "can't be proven one way or the other—but I suspect the queer readings of Carraway say more about the way we read now than they do about Nick or
The Great Gatsby." American novelist
Steve Erickson, writing in
Los Angeles magazine, states that Carraway's fascination with Gatsby is less of his being in love with Gatsby than "Carraway, back from the war and back from the Midwest and wanting nothing more than to be Gatsby himself". == Portrayals ==