The
Narrator and arguably most important
character in
F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel,
The Great Gatsby. Nick is a young man, twenty-nine years old where the novel begins, who decides to move out
East, to
New York, in order to get a start in the
Bond buisness, specifically in their
sale. Or so he would have most people believe. Nick lets on in the opening
chapter that he fled
Chicago, his hometown, in order to escape
marriage to a girl to whom he had become
close.
Nick is not a man of commitment, making him the exact opposite of Gatsby, who has devoted every fiber of his being into the pursuit of Daisy Buchanan. Nick, by contrast, finds himself unable to commit to anything. Not a job, for he leaves his bond salesman position just because he gets a little shaken up. Not a woman, for he runs from marriage to the nameless chicago woman and purposefully loses touch with Jordan Baker, not even a set of ideals; Nick's self proclaimed open-mindedness sets him up to be divorced from any real sense of morality in himself, merely the recognition of it -- and fallings from it -- in others.
As a side note, it has been decided that Nick was, in point of fact, a member of the {in)famous Yale Skull and Bones Secret Society. This is because he met Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband, at Yale in one of the Secret Societies. The only existant one with any power at the time that would have had both men, very different types, as members.