Nick Carraway is in a sanitarium. In the text, Fitzgerald merely alludes to Nick as the scribe -- within the first couple paragraphs, he describes Gatsby as "the man who gives his name to this book" -- but doesn't say so explicitly.
The film starts with a shot of the flashing green light in East Egg, Long Island, as Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) says how his father told him to always see the good in others. He is seen in the Perkins Sanitarium talking to a doctor, whose records indicate that Nick is there due to his alcoholism, among other things.
Nick Carraway
The novel's narrator, Nick is a young man from Minnesota who, after being educated at Yale and fighting in World War I, goes to New York City to learn the bond business. Honest, tolerant, and inclined to reserve judgment, Nick often serves as a confidant for those with troubling secrets.
As he tells the reader in Chapter 1, he is tolerant, open-minded, quiet, and a good listener, and, as a result, others tend to talk to him and tell him their secrets. Gatsby, in particular, comes to trust him and treat him as a confidant.
The two main settings in the novel are West Egg and East Egg and they are both important for both characterisation and key themes. The story is narrated by Nick Carraway, who comes from a wealthy family, but chooses to make his own way in the world, so moves to New York to work in stocks and shares.
Sick of the East and its empty values, Nick decides to move back to the Midwest.
It follows Nick Carraway as a soldier in World War I, his detours in Paris, and his time in New Orleans before his move up to Long Island.
Answer: At the beginning of the story, Nick describes himself as being completely bored of the honest Midwest and looking for more excitement in life, so he decides to move to New York to become a “bond man.” A bond man is a person wo is a stockbroker or financier.
Nick's reserved nature and indecisiveness show in the fact that though he feels morally repelled by the vulgarity and tastelessness of the party, he is too fascinated by it to leave. This contradiction suggests the ambivalence that he feels toward the Buchanans, Gatsby, and the East Coast in general.
In the first chapter, Nick reveals that he was born in a wealthy Midwest family. After graduating from Yale, he gains the title of a World War I veteran. He presents himself as a tolerant person who keeps his opinions to himself. It is a trait he inherited from his father, who was against criticizing people.
This is at the very end of the novel. Of the late Gatsby, Tom says, “That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust in your eyes just like he did in Daisy's….” And that's why it matters that Nick is gay and in love with Gatsby: because Tom's assessment is spot-on, but Nick will never admit it.
"I'm thirty," he tells her, "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor" (179). Nick learns that romantic intensity untempered by self-knowledge and social responsibility is a moral form of recklessness. Nick has seen the dangers of Gatsby's romantic intensity and tried to warn him of its consequences.
Nick Carraway is The Great Gatsby's narrator, but he isn't the protagonist (main character). This makes Nick himself somewhat tricky to observe, since we see the whole novel through his eyes.
Nick Carraway is in a sanitarium.
In the text, Fitzgerald merely alludes to Nick as the scribe -- within the first couple paragraphs, he describes Gatsby as "the man who gives his name to this book" -- but doesn't say so explicitly.
Also, it should be noted that though Nick was in a sanitarium, he wasn't "crazy." He was diagnosed with things such as anxiety and depression.
One of the interesting twists in this movie, though, is that the narrator, Nick Carroway (Tobey Maguire), Gatsby's neighbor and a former college classmate of Tom's, is now institutionalized in the “Perkins Sanatorium.” While getting help for “morbid alcoholism” as well as other issues, Nick is telling his Gatsby- ...
He feels the need to do this first, because he says of himself, “ I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
Nick tries to leave Tom and Myrtle, but they insist he come up to their apartment very far uptown. The apartment is small, gaudily decorated, and uncomfortable. Tom brings out a bottle of whiskey. For the second time in his life (or so he claims), Nick gets drunk, so his memory of what happens next is somewhat hazy.
Nick enters another world, a world of dreams and imagination, when he meets Jay Gatsby, who hosts lavish parties and provides expensive food and drink for guests he scarcely knows. Nick tells us he has had a brief affair with a girl, until her brother scared him off.
But here's what we think is going on: Nick realizes that chasing a future dream just ends up miring us in the past. All of our dreams are based on visions of our past self, like Gatsby who in the past believed that he would end up with Daisy and who believed in the American myth of the self-made man.
As they leave the Plaza, Nick realizes that it is his 30th birthday. Gatsby and Daisy leave together in Gatsby's car, with Daisy driving.
Why doesn't Nick judge Gatsby harshly? Nick is in love with Gatsby. Gatsby embodies everything that Nick admires about the human spirit.
“You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.” I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.” Nick addresses these words to Gatsby the last time he sees his neighbor alive, in Chapter 8.
The first published reference as “the nick” meaning a gaol or cells at a police station is from 1882 in The Sydney Slang Dictionary. It presumably expanded to mean the whole building. But the use of nick as a verb to mean steal is it seems at least 50 years older.
Settings are used for symbolic or thematic purposes.
For example, in The Great Gatsby, the Valley of Ashes – an industrial neighborhood in Queens – symbolizes the desperate circumstances of those who are victims of the capitalist system the novel describes.