#nick--carraway

[more-than-tender-curiosity]

[nation-wide-is-bi-your-side]

gay people will say anything but i love you. the fuck do you mean “they’re a rotten crowd. you’re worth the whole damn bunch put together”

[lt-sparrow]

came to me in a dream

[vulprits]

something something that night he told me everything

[im-here-homie]

Green light? What green light?

[localcuttlefish]

Group call

[iamnotshazam]

there is something deeply wrong with nick carraway in gatsby. motherfucker has been disassocating probably since the end of the war. he watches a marriage almost implode in front of him and in the stunned silence afterwards tells the awful husband, "oh yeah i just remembered today's my birthday"

i dont think casual and high school level discussions focus on how deeply weird nick must be in person and how that affects scenes? i vaguely remember analyses usually focusing on daisy and tom and gatsby but they all use nick as a barely functioning soundboard for horrible behavior and when he doesn't say anything are probably thinking "well nick seems so chill he would stop me if this was Truly Weird" and nick is meanwhile staring off into the distance thinking about what he ate last tuesday and that green eyed bilboard

edit: right and the accident literally happens next page so the weirdness of nick is probably skipped over by most readers

[watchingwhathappens]

"old sport" is a pet name.

[munsonseds]

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

The Great Gatsby | directed by Baz Luhrmann, 2013

[anneeeboleyn]

society if jay gatsby fell in love with nick carraway :

[sanguine-prince]

i’m sure i’m not the first to say something like this, but let me tell you about my poc-passing-as-white jay gatsby headcanon!!

for some background, in the 1920s there was an interesting shift regarding (white) skin tones. previously, tans were viewed as a sign that a person worked out in the fields, and therefore a trademark of the lower class. however, slowly after the industrial revolution, it increasingly became a representation of luxury, since the rich upper class would have the time to lounge about and sunbathe at their leisure.

i say all this to show that a poc gatsby would have the ostensible class and wealth for a tan, which would ‘excuse’ a slightly browner skin tone in the public eye.

(the 20s was also the setting of passing by nella larsen, so that’s neat.)

in my vision, he’s biracial (maybe his mother was black & his father was a german immigrant) with skin light enough to pass for white.

the fact that nick states that gatsby keeps his hair neatly groomed and cut might be to prevent it from curling up.

additionally, i think it could contrast tom’s white supremacy & his fear of poc social progress.

it would also create a deeper divide between gatsby and daisy, and once again the contrast between him and tom. in my mind, daisy wouldn’t know about it until the point where tom reveals everything about gatsby’s bootlegging etc. with jay revealing it to her in the car ride back (oops then she hits myrtle).

then, when she chooses tom and the life of comfort, wealth, status, etc that their marriage offers, she also rejects not only gatsby’s new money but also his race.

it’s a lot more thematically significant for the american dream as well—it’s still unattainable and essentially tainted by capitalism, and it also emphasizes that it’s restricted to the white upper class. social mobility only becomes available to gatsby when he disguises his racial identity.

similarly, it fits with gatsby’s identity reconstruction—the quintessential american is white, rich, and educated.

daisy and tom have that ticket into society because they have that inherent thing that he will never have—pedigree, in both class and race. that’s something that even nick has.

(in my mind, he tells nick all about it the night before he dies & nick understands as best he can and doesn’t think less of him, because it further highlights the differences between his & gatsby’s relationship v. gatsby’s relationship with daisy; namely, the transparency -> acceptance give-and-take that he and daisy never had. because of having to hide himself from daisy in order to maintain her affection, he builds an expectation that he must be someone that he is not as well as developing a transactional definition of love (he gives, and people love him as long as he can continue to give) in order to be loved. therefore, nick’s immediate curiosity and fascination with who he truly is is foreign to him. not to get too into their dynamic lmao i just think it’s really interesting.)

finally, the very last part where nick is sitting and looking at the bay and thinking about the first immigrants and their dreams and how gatsby embodied the purity and naivety of those dreams is further exemplified by his racial ‘otherness.’

and there’s,,, technically nothing in the book to explicitly refute this from what i remember!

(n.b.: it has been a hot second since i’ve read tgg, so lmk if i’ve got anything wrong!)

[fabtastic123]

Confession time: the only reason English teachers teach The Great Gatsby is so we can continue to fuel the Nick/Gatsby ao3 tag. It is our lifeblood.

[sar-ca5tic]

Comic panels for the great gyatsby, because I have no self control, and also because I liked the dust metaphor

His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches—once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they hadn’t been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table, with two stale, dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room, we sat smoking out into the darkness.

[more-than-tender-curiosity]

Nick Carraway being kind of a slut escapes far, far too many people

[machinel1ke]

Hi I’m Jordan and this is my boyfriend Nick and this is Nick’s boyfriend Jay and this is Jay’s girlfriend Daisy and this is Daisy’s husband Tom and this is Tom’s girlfriend Myrtle and this is Myrtle’s husband George

[fireworkss-exe]

said book being the great gatsby by f scott fitzgerald