The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1, Pages 1-10

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

So here we are a new book, a new day, and a new character whom I cannot help but find very similar  to a protagonist I recently read about. The main character in Gatsby is Nick Carraway and within only 10 pages on reading this book, I find Nick's persona and situation mimicking that of Lawrence Selden from House of Mirth. For one, Nick and Lawrence are both very intelligent and realistic. Nick has assumed a goal of becoming a renaissance man, showing that he has a yearning for knowledge, "I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again the most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man" (Fitzgerald 4). However, what I find most interesting in Nick and Lawrence's likeness, is how they both are middle class bachelors, somehow shoved into a society of the elite upper-class. This is not to say that Nick is not wealthy, he works as a bond-man at a firm, however compared to some of his friends and neighbors, he might as well be a hermit living out of a wood and limestone hut, "My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yard from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season" (Fitzgerald 5)

To kickstart his summer, Nick rides out to "the Western Egg" where he meets with his second cousin twice removed, Daisy, and her big, hulking, brute of a husband, Tom. From Nick's first-person description upon meeting Daisy, it I think it quite possible that Nick has a mild crush on his cousin. The description is quite lengthy and seems to delve into some of the much more minute details, such as her quivering lips and her "voice that the ear follows up and down"(Fitzgerald 9). Such a description hints slightly at a secret longing.