The epigraph was actually written by Fitzgerald

Nick Carraway introduces himself:

• “In my younger and more vulnerable  years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
• There is a father, there is a past, there is someone who is vulnerable -> Nick has some kind of moral values from line 1: he is kind to everyone and does not judge
• Nick consider himself as advantaged <-> he counts as disadvantaged compared to Gatsby: contradiction
• He moved to New York, then moves back at the end of the novel… WHY?
• Nick contradicts himself with everything he does and say

American identity: comes from the first puritans, the first colonists who went to America to find FREEDOM

• East Coast: New York, Long Island, superior, youth <-> Mid- West: glamouration

“I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a asense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”

• Racism
• National superiority <- it underlines the novel: we are expected to admire the Gatsbys, the Daisys
• We want to be famous to be famous

“golden”

• Should be: Wonderfully beautiful, expensive, rich
• actually: intangible

Things are not explicit in the novel

The narrator and his motivation is questionable:

• He wants to seem nice, but he makes mistakes, he misjudges people -> he is an UNRELIABLE NARRATOR: he is not sure about the things
• Maybe an insecure narrator? -> there are no certainties in the novel
• His morals are questioned from line 1
• “I had a dog –  at least I had him for a few days until he ran away” -> we get something from the narration, and then it is taken away: the key of the narration
• “and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman” -> misogyny in Nick? He is never completely full of praise for women. He puts the old care before the Finnish woman. 

Did Fitzgerald know that he was doing something extremely complicated?

T. S. Elliott: The wasteland (a poem)

Intangible, unreachable -> really important in the whole novel

The questioning the modern morality:

• A society believing in money and not any god
• What can be interpreted in these new American times as values?

Nick hero worships Gatsby:

• Gatsby is everything Nick is not
• He makes the reader wants to be Gatsby, even though we know that wealth is hollow

Setting the scene of West and East Egg, and about Nick’s own pathway and his self image

*notes made by this video