Home Delivery Secrets - The Earlham Bus Incident

Written by Susanna Jones with contributions from Hannah Wood
Filming by Piece/Maker Productions and Jack Garden
Editing by James Wood
Cast (with Instagram handles): Jenja Sineva (@ptichka_sineva); Callum Neate (@calboyyeeha); Andy Gladman (@andy_is_also_glad); Susanna Jones (@susanna_does_standup); Allie Docious; Aaron Hood (@adhdbingo)

[@tomasroberts2016]

Nick is the narrator of the novel; the story is told in his voice and through his perceptions. It has also been suggested that Nick may be the character F. Scott Fitzgerald based most closely on himself. In a sense, then, Nick may show Fitzgerald’s own opinions of wealthy, immoral characters like Gatsby.
Nick is a good Midwestern boy who attended Yale and moved to New York in 1922 to work in the bond market. He is well-positioned to narrate this story-he is Daisy Buchanon’s cousin, went to Yale with Tom Buchanon, and rents the house next door to Gatsby’s. From his vantage point, Nick can see everything that goes on. What’s more, he’s the kind of guy that people want to tell their stories-and their secrets-to.
Nick tells us in the first chapter that his father cautioned him about judging people: “‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had’” (1). Nick tries to follow his father’s advice; he acts as a sounding board for the other characters, particularly Gatsby, and as they confide in him, we learn more about their lives.
There is debate over whether Nick is a Reliable Narrator-this is, if he tells us the whole truth about what he sees, hears, and experiences. In the beginning of the novel, Nick certainly seems reliable. But as he says, tolerance of others “has a limit” (2, ch. 1)). Gatsby represents everything Nick hates about the East, with its emphasis on money and status and its lack of morality. For some reason-perhaps because he’s fascinated by Gatsby in the beginning, then friends with him despite Gatsby’s crimes-Nick extends his limit, learning more about both the East and himself in the process.
As much as Nick hates about the East, he experiences internal conflict about the things he does like. The fast pace of New York and the focus on having fun intrigues him; as a Midwesterner, he knows his limits, unlike those surrounding him. He is driven to have fun at Gatsby’s weekly parties and to “burn his candle at both ends,” but he also wants to maintain the organized, simple lifestyle he knows from back home.
His relationship with Jordan Baker also couldn’t happen anywhere but in New York. When he meets her in chapter 1, Nick remembers “some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago” (18). His forgetfulness seems to come from his close attention to her-“I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet” (11). He goes on to describe the last rays of daylight “deserting her with lingering regret” (14) and the “autumn-leaf yellow of her hair” (17). The atmosphere of West Egg enables Nick to forget whatever he’s heard about Jordan when he watches her and listens to her frank opinions. He becomes infatuated quickly.
Daisy determines to fix Nick and Jordan up, and tells Jordan Nick will look after her. Nick doesn’t protest. It’s at this point that we hear about Nick’s fractured romance out West-or so Daisy believes. Nick tells us that he dated a friend and that the rumors of their marriage drove him to leave. Nick is careful about revealing personal details of his past, a bit like Fitzgerald himself. He does let us know he is disgusted and touched at the same time that Daisy would even care about his failed relationship.
In chapter 3, Jordan becomes Nick’s “date” for a party after he drinks too much in embarrassment over asking where Gatsby is (which is, apparently, not a good idea, even at Gatsby’s party). They wander the grounds, chatting with other party guests (including Jordan’s real date, an anonymous undergraduate) until “the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound” (47). This night also marks the first time Nick meets Gatsby. It seems that Nick equates Jordan and Gatsby in his mind; in a sense, his farewell to Gatsby the night of the broken wheel could be a “kiss goodnight” from Jordan.
Later in the chapter, Nick sees Jordan again, after she has become a golf champion. He admits that “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity” (57). He follows that observation with another-“She was incurably dishonest” (58). We will discover along with Nick later in the novel that Gatsby is also “incurably dishonest”; however, these characters are the ones Nick feels drawn to. Nick says, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (59), almost as if honesty is a failing compared to Jordan and Gatsby.
Nick grows closer and closer to Gatsby as the novel progresses. He learns, first through Jordan then from Gatsby himself, that Gatsby’s only goal in life is to be reunited with Daisy. Nick then finds himself in the same position Daisy claims she is in with Jordan and himself-except in this case, the matchmaking is meant to be serious. This makes Nick understandably uncomfortable, as his Midwestern upbringing taught him marriage was sacred; also, knowing Gatsby as well as he does, he doesn’t seem sure that he’d want Gatsby marrying his cousin.
Gatsby does gallantly take the blame for Daisy’s car accident, causing more internal conflict for Nick. Tom lies to Wilson, which results in Gatsby’s death. Nick is surrounded by deceit and violence, and he is disgusted by it. He determines that Gatsby, for all his faults, may be the only person he knows with any character at all. This, too, throws Nick into confusion. He arranges a small funeral for Gatsby and ends his relationship with Jordan; in a sense, Nick can’t have a relationship with someone he associates so closely with his friend.
At the novel’s end, Nick moves back to the Midwest to escape the disgust he feels for the people surrounding Gatsby's life and for the emptiness and moral decay of life among the wealthy on the East Coast. He comes to a realization about that life: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all-Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life” (176).
This is the point where Fitzgerald and his opinions speak the most clearly through Nick. Just as Gatsby's dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and deceit, the American dream of happiness and individualism has fallen apart, replaced by the mere pursuit of wealth. Nick, who was in awe of Gatsby's power to transform his dreams into reality, realizes that the dream-for Gatsby and for America-is over, and no power in the world can bring it back.
Nick’s character develops from a relatively objective observer to a full participant in the action of the novel, both physically and emotionally. As a result, perhaps his reliability as a narrator changes as well. How much of the other characters’ actions and reactions are just observed, and how much is filtered through Nick’s perceptions of them? His promise to his father at the beginning is compromised by the reality around him. The “advantages [he’s] had” were the simple adherence to a code that doesn’t apply to New York or to the world of Jay Gatsby. When he loses those advantages, Nick returns to find what he has lost.