Narrator analysis

I have been reading The Great Gatsby for a few weeks now. A book written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and it was first published 1926. Now it is time to analyze the narrator and the following text is the result.

 “Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of the three nights several weeks apart were all absorbed me. On contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs. “  Page 62

The paragraph above shows clearly how the story is told in a first person perspective and that the narrator is internal. The narrator is Nick Carraway. He tells the story like he has experienced it and sometimes also like someone has told him about the episode. Therefore there are also parts with a third person perspective when he retells what someone has told him.

Nick Carraway knowledge limits the story because he does not know everything about the characters and can only tells what he knows and has understood. He can know something he has not experienced if he has heard or read about it. This can possibly result in that the reader feels like there is a true story, because this is how we experience the real life.  

All occurrences have taken place in the past and Carraway can choose what he wants to tell and in what order. Furthermore how he wants to describe the characters and himself.  He presents them like he knows them. Carraway does not focus on his own character, as the reader can think in the very beginning of the book. In contrast there are the other characters’ stories that he tells about, in the way he has learnt about them.  Are the stories reliable then? Maybe not, would your life story be totally correctly if someone else told it?

That was it. Next time it will be a character analysis.