Retrospect and Morality

Lehan, Richard. "Seeing and Misseeing: Narrative Unfolding." Great Gatsby. (1995): 111-125. Print.

Nick Carraway is confusing at times and difficult to break down the limitations of his character. Richard Lehan states the question of Nick's inconsistencies but Nick does redeem himself on being the only character with interiority of his internal being and internalizes the strange world around him. Lehan says that by connecting with Nick as the narrative, we feel inevitably built into his story in retrospect and is why we connect to him when we can see that the story has already begun to unfold. Fitzgerald creates Nick to deeply support the ideas of moral attention and being morally problematic. Nick believes the world is at its moral state forever. Lehan strongly believes that understanding the moral nature of the story helps us to focus on why Nick is unable to bring the world he is describing into focus. Nick clouds his own judgment when he tries to make the world in his own creation but soon realizes he does not succeed. The pioneer vision of America and Gatsby’s vision of Daisy are his obscured views of the world. He tries to explain and break down these visions in his own way, but that narration shows only Nick’s judgments and not the character’s actual feelings. He feels everything should be perfect but nothing ever is.

Reading this article, it is apparent that the narration is unfolding in a way in which it is hard to understand why Nick is so reliant on moral belief. Lehan states that Nick's narrative draws us in to the moral compostition of the story. We see his moral belief but what about the other characters? Fitzgerald may have changed his narrative to compliment this question. Not being able to understand why Fitzgerald's narration is in this way, helps us to hold back our judgment until we can understand the full effect of Nick. If we can hold back on passing judgment on Nick, why can’t he hold back on passing judgment and controlling everything around him? This article explains he narrates in the sense to control, to prove the belief of moral attention. We would have to undo the possibility of moral center to get a sense of Nick’s inner reality and why being subjective helps him to write in this manner. Being able to grasp Fitzgerald’s narrative and why he created Nick to make judgments, could help us to understand the complexity of moral character also. Understanding why Nick is so strongly content on morality opens up doors to the meaning of narrations and to how this story was created. This article helps us to infer how and why we are affected by the kind of narrative that is used.