My Little English Corner
A new accent is an adventure. Be bold! Exaggerate wildly!
Normally I run on the treadmill at work while listening to my IPhone. Yesterday, I left my headphone at home and couldn’t listen to songs or radio programs, so I read Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby instead. Because I was running in the meantime, the reading was considerably slow. But running tends to stimulate my thinking random thoughts, so like 京燕花园 said, I have racing thoughts while racing. Yesterday the result was: I fell in love with Nick Carraway, the “I” in The Great Gatsby! Isn’t that crazy? Let me tell you how…
First, here is my summary of Chapter 2. Nick got to meet “Tom’s girl”— Myrtle Wilson, wife of a local car repair shop owner. Together the three of them went to New York by train. Tom bought a dog for Myrtle at the station and they then went to an apartment， which was apparently Tom and Myrtle’s rendezvous place. Several friends of Tom’s came over and they drank a lot together. The carousal ended on a bad note when Tom broke Myrtle’s nose as he was offended by her keeping on shouting Daisy’s name in front of everyone.
When Nick was introducing a guest, “Mr. McKee, who was a pale, feminine man from the flat below”, he said: “He had just shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone…”. I wondered what role this white spot nuisance would play. I was very glad to see that this spot was mentioned again near the end of this chapter:
“It was nine o’clock — almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon.”
That just made me laugh out loud on the treadmill. Haha, I love this man, Nick Carraway. I don’t know if Fitzgerald was trying to tell us that Nick had OCD and it was a whimsical thing to do, but I feel I probably would have done the same thing if I were Nick. I went back to Chapter 1 and read this part that cracked me up before:
“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over to-night.”
It’s such a smart-ass comment. After saying “There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air”, of course that’s not why he went over to the Duchanans’ but he said that to humor the hostess who was obviously very proud of this silly trivial “family secret” and had nothing better to talk about.
There are different types of narrators in the literature. Without googling, I thought of these commonly seen ones:
(1) an omnipresent and omnicompetent third person who can see close at hand how the story unfolds and who reveals what’s going on inside people’s minds and rationalizes the motivation of their action,
(2)an autobiographical one who sees the world through his/her own eyes and is the protagonist,
And (3) an observer who assumes a secondary role and tells the story from this third person’s perspective. There could be another one that tells the story in the second person style, as if talking to the readers by addressing the readers directly. This is normally in the form of a letter and not commonly seen in fictional works.
In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway is primarily an observer, but he occasionally throws in this kind of behavior and reminds us that the observer is not a simple prop, he is a human being who has an offbeat sense of humor. Also from the beginning he earns our trust by telling us what kind of person he is. It all makes sense now that the novel starts with Nick’s father saying, “whenever you feel like criticizing someone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
He is laying the background, telling us: I am not going to judge the characters in this novel. You, the reader, are going to make your own judgment. I don’t want to affect your opinions. Action speaks louder than words: whatever happens in this novel speaks for itself and whatever actions the heroes take shows their personalities and character.
The observer trusts the readers and lets the readers’ own imagination complete the picture. Whatever is said in the novel is what the author wants the readers to see and whatever is unsaid is left to the readers to fill in the blanks. In addition, this trait of reserving judgments “has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores”. This way, he establishes his authority in telling the story by reassuring the readers that they are getting a close-to-full picture of the whole story. The readers can therefore feel comfortable that they are seeing a full story and it is not a distorted version.
This reminds me of another narrator in “Ethan Frome”, which I recently started reading after seeing discussion about Zeena Frome between Erjie and BMDN. Is Zeena Frome an evil person? I don’t know. The narrator, as an onlooker, does not tell you what goes on in Zeena’s mind and we have no way to prove that she has any evil intentions. The narrator is not going to judge Zeena for the readers. He leaves the readers to gain their own perspectives through reading the novel and understanding it in their own way. When I finish reading it, I might agree with BMDN or with Erjie, or agree with neither. The variety of understanding and the story’s haunting effects are where the beauty lies and they are what writers like Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, with their superb story-telling craft, have achieved and many novelists try to achieve.
Now I have fallen in love with Nick Carraway, I will start noticing more about his role in the following chapters of the book. I sure hope Tobey Maguire will do a good job playing Nick in the upcoming The Great Gatsby movie. Good luck, Tobey, at living up to my high expectations!
