Question

Describe Nick in The Great Gatsby. What facts do you know about him, and what do you infer about him? What kind of narrator do you think he will be?

Accepted Answer

We know that Nick in The Great Gatsby is from an upper-class Midwestern family, financially comfortable but not particularly wealthy. He has received an elite education at Yale and has a strong sense of the complexity of class distinctions. He is a relatively reliable and balanced narrator, despite his prejudices, and makes an effort to present the other characters in a nuanced fashion.

Answer

Nick describes himself in unusual detail at the beginning of the novel, starting with a claim that he is "inclined to reserve all judgments." In a narrator, this is clearly a claim that he will simply present the facts and let the reader decide what to make of the characters and their actions. It is worth making a distinction in this regard between Nick as narrator and Nick as a character in the novel. As a character, he clearly does make moral judgments, particularly in the heat of the moment, as when he refuses to shake hands with Tom Buchanan. As a narrator, however, Nick clearly likes some characters more than others (and, for that matter, dislikes most of them) but is committed to presenting them in all their complexity, as he presents himself, with some attempt at detachment.
Nick tells us a lot about his family and his ancestry. His family have been "prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations" and claim aristocratic descent, though Nick dismisses this as apocryphal. The Carraways are the poorest of the rich, on the same social level as Tom and Daisy, despite a vast difference in wealth. This parity is partly the result of education, since Nick and Tom were at Yale together. We can infer a great deal about Nick's values and attitudes from the information he chooses to include and from the exact social distinctions to which he refers. He appears balanced and thoughtful, a reasonably reliable narrator, though one with strong social and aesthetic prejudices, which he reveals in his focus on genealogy, education, and social status.

Answer

Nick comes from a privileged background. This Midwesterner is a graduate of an Ivy League college at a time when the majority of people didn't graduate from high school. Nick's father bankrolls his start in the New York financial sector. He falls in easily with the wealthy Buchanans: Daisy is his cousin, and Tom is a college friend. Notably, Tom unhesitatingly includes Nick as a "Nordic," part of, to Tom's mind, the superior race.
While Nick is class-conscious, for instance recognizing that Gatsby's pink suits are garish or mentally poking fun at him for claiming to big-game hunt in Europe (the big game was actually in India or Africa), Nick, unlike Tom, is able to transcend class and see the good in Gatsby.
Nick is a lonely romantic who wanders the streets of New York some evenings after work looking longingly into people's windows. He has blind spots, which make him an unreliable narrator: for example, he explains honesty as his "cardinal" virtue in a passage where he essentially confesses to leading on the girlfriend in the Midwest he is no longer interested in.
Nick's sense of the romantic, the possibility and potential for life to be better than it is, leads him to respond strongly to the trait of romantic "readiness" in Gatsby. Nick is the good listener, the person who observes, which makes him an apt narrator of events. In the end, his romantic tendencies lead to disillusion but also the ability to see Gatsby's greatness in his pursuit of his dream.

Answer

We know that Nick fought in World War I, which he calls the "Great War," and that he "came back restless," no longer thinking of the Midwest as a warm, important place and feeling the need to go somewhere else, somewhere bigger and busier. So, he moved to New York to "learn the bond business." He, likewise, tells us that he has a high tolerance for people, even those who behave badly, because of the advice his father gave him a long time ago: that "a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."
However, Nick also shares that his patience "has a limit." We can infer that he reached this limit when dealing with many of the people in the story he is about to share, especially as he says that "Only Gatsby . . . was exempt from [his] reaction." Despite the fact that Gatsby embodies "everything for which [Nick has] an unaffected scorn," he credits Gatsby with a kind of hope, a kind of innocence and romanticism and naivety that make him special.
From this information, we might surmise that Nick is not going to be a very reliable narrator. We have inferred that he has grown intolerant of everyone in this story but Jay Gatsby, and so he is more likely to represent them in a negative light while more likely to focus on Gatsby's positive attributes.

Answer

Nick presents himself as a person of some ambition, privileged background (snobbishly moral in his description), and discusses how he thinks he was viewed by his peers in college. 
People accused him of being a politician because he was agreeable and was in the confidence of many people. 
Nick does not see this tendency as a strength. In fact, he learns to avoid people through various means when he feels they are about to confide in him. Furthermore, the moral gem that Nick's father once shared with him is challenged by these confessions of "wild, unknown men". 
His father told him that not everyone was born with the same amount of moral sense.

His father also told him, prophetically, that “a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”

While Nick suggests he would like to maintain a hopeful view of people, he admits that he has lost patience in this effort. He does not adhere to his father's bit of wisdom in his dealings with people because he has been privy to too many secrets from people who never seem to redeem themselves. 
This complex attitude is expressed at turns implicitly and explicitly in the opening section of the novel. 
Nick also reflects on his somewhat naive aspirations for his summer in the east. This innocent dreaming becomes significant as we later encounter the great dreamer, Jay Gatsby, and Nick finds a connection between himself and this grand figure.

The Great Gatsby Questions and Answers
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Describe Nick in The Great Gatsby. What facts do you know about him, and what do you infer about him? What kind of narrator do you think he will be?

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