Garrett Hinson
American Literature II
3/15/13
The Sexuality of Nick Carraway The Great Gatsby’s narrator, Nick Carraway, belongs alongside the most sexually-complicated characters in all of literature, and while his character is seemingly-secondary throughout the novel, his crucial role as narrator requires that we form some sort of understanding of his enigmatic sexuality, for it has extremely significant implications for the rest of the plot. It is difficult to dismiss Nick’s often-sensual descriptions of men, his vague encounter with the party guest Mr. McKee, and his strangely-distant relationship with Jordan Baker as irrelevant to Nick’s perspective as narrator; each seems to suggest at least a latent tendency towards homosexuality. If indeed we are to interpret these behaviors as homosexual, then the entire attraction towards Jay Gatsby that Nick builds his story upon becomes more complicated. Nick would not merely being telling the story of a person he found to be beautiful, but a man he found to beautiful. This distinction refocuses the novel’s purpose entirely. Nick Carrway may in fact be in love with Jay Gatsby, and because Nick (as a possibly unreliable narrator) may not be able to admit this to his readers or to himself, it falls to us, the readers, to draw our own conclusions. In his first mention of Gatsby, Nick admits that “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him…” (Fitzgerald 2). While this description is far from inherently-sexual, Nick’s choice of the word “gorgeous” (which he also uses to describe Gatsby’s car and pink suit later in the novel) plants a seed of curiosity in the mind of the reader; clearly Nick is attracted to Gatsby in some manner, though the nature of that attraction remains vague for the time being. This dynamic is colored further by Nick’s encounter with