Why does nick carraway admire gatsby

Nick sees the loneliness in Gatsby and can relate to that on a major level. Although Nick did not fully agree on most of the things Gatsby has done but he can understood why he was doing each of his actions.

This is what brought them close to each other. Eva I found Nick and Gatsby to both be lonesome characters. Sure, Gatsby knew plenty of people but he didn't necesarrily have anyone. Although Nick didn't have any "ex-lover" we know of and nothing was really said about him having any family or any friends, he was pretty much alone too living in a small house next to Gatsby's mansion.

I didn't find Nick's attachment to Gatby admiration, only because throughout the novel he had judged Gatby's actions and obsession with Daisy. I found Nick's attachment to Gatby possibly a result of Nick feeling as if they can both relate to that feeling of lonlieness.

But, througout the novel, Nick was a very nosey character, which can also add to his reasoning for why he was attached to Gatsby. Gatsby , believes that the past can be repeated. The narrator describes Gatsby as having something gorgeous about him. He also says that Gatsby is optimistic about life, has an extraordinary gift for hope, and is romantic in a way that no one else is.

The story's first adventure, and the one that comprises a large portion of Chapter 1 , is Nick's visit with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, at their mansion in East Egg.

As the story unfolds, Tom serves as a foil to Gatsby , marking a striking contrast from Gatsby's newly found wealth and dreamy nature. In that novel, Nick loves Gatsby , the erstwhile James Gatz of North Dakota, for his capacity to dream Jay Gatsby into being and for his willingness to risk it all for the love of a beautiful woman.

In a queer reading of Gatsby , Nick doesn't just love Gatsby , he's in love with him. Nick admires Gatsby due to his optimism, how he shapes his own life, and how doggedly he believes in his dream, despite the cruel realities of s America. Jay Gatsby - The title character and protagonist of the novel, Gatsby is a fabulously wealthy young man living in a Gothic mansion in West Egg.

He is famous for the lavish parties he throws every Saturday night, but no one knows where he comes from, what he does, or how he made his fortune. Chapter one of The Great Gatsby introduces the narrator, Nick Carraway, and establishes the context and setting of the novel. Nick begins by explaining his own situation. The novel is set in the years following WWI, and begins in Nick is particularly taken with Gatsby and considers him a great figure.

He sees both the extraordinary quality of hope that Gatsby possesses and his idealistic dream of loving Daisy in a perfect world. Nick gets an invitation to one of Gatsby's parties and attends in hopes of meeting his neighbor. Nick does meet Gatsby , and they become friends even though Gatsby has ulterior motives when he enlists Nick to help him become reintroduced to Daisy Buchanan. She is wealthy, hard-to-get, and a debutante. He is completely unable to realize that his dream is not a reality and so stands watching for a sign from Daisy.

He sees what he is doing as noble, honorable, and purposeful. The reader, however, sees the futility of his task as he becomes a parody of his former self. Gatsby is, quite literally, fatally idealistic. He can't wait to distance himself from his past in terms of his family, but yet he lives his adult life trying to recapture the past he had with Daisy.

What makes matters worse, too, is that he is in love with the idea of Daisy, not Daisy as she herself is. Previous Nick Carraway. Next Daisy Buchanan. Removing book from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title.

Are you sure you want to remove bookConfirmation and any corresponding bookmarks? Remember that the book is narrated by Nick Carraway, and all of our impressions of the characters come from his point of view.

So the real question is "why does Nick Carraway think Gatsby is great? And the answer to that comes from Gatsby's outlook and hope, not his money or extravagance, which are in fact everything that Nick claims to despise. Nick admires Gatsby due to his optimism, how he shapes his own life, and how doggedly he believes in his dream, despite the cruel realities of s America.

So Gatsby's greatness comes from his outlook—even if, to many readers, Gatsby's steadfast belief in Daisy's love and his own almost god-like abilities come off as delusional.

Gatsby is not so much obsessed with repeating the past as reclaiming it. He wants to both return to that beautiful, perfect moment when he wedded all of his hopes and dreams to Daisy in Louisville, and also to make that past moment his present and future! It also means getting right what he couldn't get right the first time by winning Daisy over.

So Gatsby's obsession with the past is about control—over his own life, over Daisy—as much as it is about love. Even after he's managed to amass great wealth, Gatsby still searches for control over his life in other ways. Perhaps he fixates on the reclamation of that moment in his past because by winning over Daisy, he can finally achieve each of the dreams he imagined as a young man. The Great Gatsby would probably be much less memorable, first of all!

Sad endings tend to stick in your mind more stubbornly than happy ones. Furthermore, the novel would lose its power as a reflection on the American Dream -- if Gatsby ended up with Daisy, the book would be a straightforward rags-to-riches American Dream success story. In order to be critical of the American Dream, Gatsby has to lose everything he's gained. The novel would also lose its power as an indictment of class in America, since if Daisy and Gatsby ended up together it would suggest walls coming down between old and new money, something that never happens in the book.

Instead, the novel depicts class as a rigid and insurmountable barrier in s America. A happy ending would also seem to reward both Gatsby's bad behavior including crime, dishonesty, and cheating as well as Daisy's cheating, killing Myrtle. This would change the tone of the ending, since Gatsby's tragic death seems to outweigh any of his crimes in Nick's eyes. Also, Gatsby likely wouldn't have caught on as an American classic during the ultra-conservative s had its ending appeared to endorse behavior like cheating, crime, and murder.

In short, although on your first read of the novel you more than likely are hoping for Gatsby to succeed in winning over Daisy, the novel would be much less powerful with a stereotypically happy ending. There is a bit of a progression in how the reader regards the American Dream in the course of the novel, which moves in roughly three stages and corresponds to what we know about Jay Gatsby.

First, the novel expresses a cautious belief in the American Dream. Gatsby's parties are lavish, Nick rides over the Queensboro bridge with optimism and the belief that anything can happen in New York 4.

However, this optimism quickly gives way to skepticism. As you learn more about Gatsby's background and likely criminal ties in the middle-to-late chapters , combined with how broken George seems in Chapter 7 upon learning of his wife's affair, it seems like the lavish promises of the American Dream we saw in the earlier half of the book are turning out to be hollow, at best.

This skepticism gives way to pessimism by the end of the novel. With Gatsby dead, along with George and Myrtle, and only the rich alive, the novel has progressed to a charged, emotional critique of the American Dream.

After all, how can you believe in the American Dream in a world where the strivers end up dead and those born into money literally get away with murder? So by the end of the novel, the reader should be pretty pessimistic about the state of the American Dream, though there is a bit of hope to be found in the way Nick reflects on Gatsby's outlook and extends Gatsby's hope to everyone in America.

How you answer this prompt will depend on the definition you use of tragic hero. The most straightforward definition is pretty obvious: a tragic hero is the hero of a tragedy. And to be precise, a tragedy is a dramatic play, or more recently any work of literature, that treats sorrowful events caused or witnessed by a great hero with dignity and seriousness.

If we consider The Great Gatsby a tragedy, that would certainly make Gatsby a tragic hero, since he's the hero of the book! But in Aristotle's influential and more specific definition, a tragic hero is a flawed individual who commits, without evil intentions, some wrong that leads to their misfortunate, usually followed by a realization of the true nature of events that led to his destiny. The tragic hero also has a reversal of fortune, often going from a high place in terms of society, money, and status to a ruined one.

He also has a "tragic flaw," a character weakness that leads to his demise. Using Aristotle's definition of a tragic hero, Gatsby might not fit. There isn't a sense that he commits some great wrong unlike, say, the classic example of Oedipus Rex, who kills his own father and marries his mother —rather, his downfall is perhaps the result of a few smaller wrongs: he commits crimes and puts too much faith in Daisy, who ends up being a killer.

In that sense, Gatsby is more of a playful riff on the idea of a tragic hero, someone who is doomed from aiming too high and from trusting too much. Especially since a huge part of The Great Gatsby is a critique of the American Dream, and specifically the unjust American society that all of the characters have to live within, the idea of a tragic hero—a single person bringing about his own fate—doesn't quite fit within the frame of the novel.

Instead, Nick seems to indict the society around Gatsby for the tragedy, not Gatsby himself. On the surface in Gatsby, we see a man doing whatever it takes to win over the woman he loves Daisy.

He even seems willing to sacrifice everything to protect her by taking the blame for Myrtle's death. However, he ends up killed for his involvement in the affair while Daisy skips town to avoid the aftermath.

This can make it look like Gatsby loves Daisy truly while Daisy doesn't love him at all. However, the truth is much more complicated. Gatsby claims to love Daisy, but he rarely takes into account her own feelings or even the fact that five years have passed since their first romance and that she's changed.

In fact, he's so determined to repeat the past that he is unable to see that Daisy is not devoted to him in the way he thinks she is. Furthermore, Gatsby seems to love Daisy more for what she represents -- money, status, beauty -- than as an actual, flawed human being. As for Daisy, it's pretty clear she loved Gatsby up until she married Tom see the bathtub scene as recounted by Jordan in Chapter 4 , but whether she still loves him or is just eager to escape her marriage is harder to determine you can read more in depth about Daisy right here.