CHARACTERISTICS OF

NICK AND JORDAN

From “the Great Gatsby”
Jordan
Baker
 Jordan Baker in " The Great
Gatsby" is a close friend of
Daisy Buchanan’s, Jordan dates
Nick Carraway during the
novel and plays a crucial role
in reuniting Daisy with the Jay
Gatsby.
She is a couple of years
younger than Daisy, she is
single and a professional
golfer.
 The first thing that we can notice
about Jordan during reading the book is
her placement and posture. Only after
that we can notice her appearance, which
we can find attractive. Nick tells us a lot
about Jordan’s appearance, in fact more
than he does about Daisy’s .
We can clearly see Jordan’s gray
eyes, her wan, charming face, the
autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, and the
slender muscles in her arms. Clearly
Nick spends a lot of time looking at
Jordan!
 In book Jordan is blond and very athletic, physical, tan, and
angular, while in most film adaptations Jordan is a dark-haired .

From book From film

 Jordan represents one of the “new women” of the
1920s—cynical, boyish, and self-centered. Jordan is
beautiful, but also dishonest: she cheated in order to
win her first golf tournament and continually bends
the truth.
 The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was
extended full length at her end of the divan, completely
motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were
Quotes about Jordan
balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.
done by Nick
If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no
hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring
an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long

couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday
I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small- Evening Post"—the words, murmurous and
breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she uninflected, running together in a soothing tune.
accentuated by throwing her body backward at the The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the
shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the
eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender
out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred muscles in her arms.
to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her,
somewhere before.
 NICK
CARRAWAY
 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. How
can you watch the narrator? This
difficulty is compounded by the
fact that Nick is an unreliable
narrator – basically, a narrator who
doesn’t always tell us the truth
about what’s happening.
 Nick grew up in the “middle
West,” (what we call the
Midwest), in a wealthy family that
was “something of a clan” (1.5).
His family made their money from
a wholesale hardware business his
grandfather’s brother began after
sending a substitute to fight for
him in the Civil War. Nick
attended Yale, like his father, and
then fought in WWI.
 Upon his return, he found the Midwest
incredibly boring and so set off for New
York to become a bond salesman: “I enjoyed
the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came
back restless. Instead of being the warm
center of the world the middle-west now
seemed like the ragged edge of the universe
—so I decided to go east and learn the bond
business” (1.6). Of course, we later find out
that Nick’s also getting away from a woman
who expects that they’re getting married, but
Nick downplays this fact in his narration,
which is one of our clues to his dishonesty.
 In my younger and more
vulnerable years my father gave
me some advice that I've been
turning over in my mind ever
since. "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."
(1.1-2)
 When I came back from the East last
autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be
in uniform and at a sort of moral attention
forever; I wanted no more riotous
excursions with privileged glimpses into
the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man
who gives his name to this book, was
exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who
represented everything for which I have
an unaffected scorn.
Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy
and Gatsby any more but of this
clean, hard, limited person who dealt
in universal skepticism and who
leaned back jauntily just within the
circle of my arm. A phrase began to
beat in my ears with a sort of heady
excitement: "There are only the
pursued, the pursuing, the busy and
the tired." (4.164)
Since Nick gives a roughly chronological account of the summer
of 1922, we get to see the development of Gatsby from
mysterious party-giver to love-struck dreamer to tragic figure
(who rose from humble roots and became rich, all in a failed
Why Is Nick the Narrator and
attempt to win over Daisy). If Gatsby was the narrator, it
would be harder for Fitzgerald to show that Not Gatsby?
progression, unless Gatsby relayed his life story way out of
order, which might have been hard to accomplish from Gatsby’s
POV.

The novel would have also been a much more Unless the point of view abruptly switched
straightforward story, probably with less suspense: Gatsby after Gatsby was shot, the reader would have
was born poor in South Dakota, became friends with Dan
Cody, learned how to act rich, lost Cody’s inheritance, fell in no idea what exactly happened to Gatsby,
love with Daisy, fought in the war, became determined to win what happened to George Wilson, and finally
her back, turned to crime. In short, Fitzgerald could have told wouldn’t be able to see Gatsby’s funeral.
the same story, but it would have had much less suspense and
mystery, plus it would have been much harder to relay the
aftermath of Gatsby’s death