What They Didn't Teach You About the Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway

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If you have read or are reading 'The Great Gatsby', maybe for school maybe for just for fun, you'll no doubt have some opinions about Nick. He is the narrator of the book so what you think of him will shape you opinion of the whole novel. But for someone so central to the plot he doesn't talk about himself much. If you do look a bit closer things don't quite seem to add up, and it bothered me for a little while until, when discussing the book with a friend, it was suggested Nick was gay. Do you have a sneaking suspicion too? or are you looking for something unusual to add to an essay to surprise an examiner. Here is is my attempt to get Nick out of the closet

Great Gatsby quotes about Nick are littered with references to how gorgeous Gatsby is or how handsome or attractive, the list goes on. Now maybe I'm just jealous because only my mother calls my handsome, and I don't think she really means it, but isn't that a little bit much. He is infatuated with Gatsby, caught up in his spell, his better judgement succumbing to his fascination. While other characters call him a bootlegger or a gangster or just an ordinary man Nick is always waxing lyrical about his romantic readiness or the pureness of his dream. Isn't he just a beer baron hung up on his ex girlfriend. How much of all this idealised hero only exists in Nick's head.

Yes he does have relationships with women, 3 if you're counting, but he isn't a Casanova by any standards. He barely mentions any of them, and his reasons for ending them always seem a little suspect. The first because he was scared he was going to get peer pressured into marrying a girl (so scared he moved state), the second because the girl's brother was looking at him funny and the 3rd, Jordan, because he needed more time to think about Gatsby. Maybe he wanted to look up other words for gorgeous in the thesaurus.

And last but not least there is his, well, one night stand? I don't really know how to describe it. GO and read the end of chapter 2 again and you'll see what I mean. They leave the party together, they end up semi naked in his bedroom and then the next think we know it's 4 am and Nick is getting the train home. All this is described in very little detail I guess that's is one of the perks of being your own narrator.

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Deconstructing William Shakespeare's Heroines in Literature

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The Bard was perhaps the most radical and experimenting writer of his age when he tried issues of homosexuality in the sonnets, but he was a conservative when it came to the "fairer sex". His heroines can be broadly classified under two categories - abiding and independent. I am using the term "heroine" strictly to denote the leading ladies, and not the supporting cast. As far as the leading female characters are concerned, most are the good girls with a natural abiding nature and hardly any ambition of their own. Those who have this spark fall under the category of 'independent' and are mostly termed as the "witch".

Let us start with the ladies of the negative category, so that we can slowly compare them with the heroines who followed the rules. The first name that comes to our mind is Lady Macbeth. If taken as a modern lady, she is ambitious, persuasive, and determined. Had she been the CEO of a company in these days, she would have given good competition to many male CEOs over the world. But she is a woman, known with the name of her husband. She cannot do anything actively, for she is the second sex. Even if she tried to gain the fate that she believed she and her husband deserved, the society - in the form of fate - abandons her and death becomes her ultimate fate.

The second lady whose portrayal we need to deconstruct is Katherina, from The Taming of the Shrew. She is the shrew, because she is intelligent. She has a mind of her own, and can make her own decisions, so she needs to be tamed. And the taming is such a harsh process that when we read or watch this play in these modern times, we feel that an almost inhuman cruelty was meted out to her. The pleasure in subduing a powerful woman is always there, and it was with the great Shakespeare as well.

The good girls, who got all the rewards, were no doubt the most abiding and na?ve ones. When a Juliet loves with her whole innocence, she has to sacrifice her life to be accepted as a pure lady. She could not stand strong in the face of troubles or she would have been banned by fate as well. Similarly, ladies like Ophelia, Desdemona and Hermione had to sacrifice their lives or at least pretend to do so, in order to gain the status of a virtuous lady.

There are heroines like Rosalind, Viola and Portia who try to break free from the norm, but somehow fall short of being the powerful woman that they should have been. The common thing with these is that they all take the guise of a man, as if trying to go beyond their identity as a weak woman. But in the end, they do it for the sake of the common god, just as a good girl is expected to give up everything for the sake of the men in her life. Rosalind took the guise of Ganymede to save herself and her sister, Viola did it to save survive in the strange land of Illyria and Portia did it to save her husband's friend. The most daring deed was done by Portia, for she went ahead and challenged a group of men. But the temporary insult that she received in the hands of her own husband when Bassanio gave her their wedding ring for saving his friend Antonio's life is perhaps her punishment for challenging a men's world of law.

To conclude, I would like to bring up the example of the heroine of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native. She also took the guise of a man, but for her own sake - for her own amusement. And we all remember her tragic fate. She was ambitious, spirited and independent. But her ignominious end came by drowning herself out of shame and frustration. So, it is not just Shakespeare, but women from all times in literature have been shown as the model of virtue so that men could triumph over her and boast of their strength.

Simantini Sinha is an avid reader on various topics, and her interests lie in books, music, food and more. her articles are published in magazines and dailies.