POST #13 WHAT DID NICK CARRAWAY KNOW?

In honor of the first anniversary of the publication of "Jay Gatsby: A Black Man in Whiteface" here is one of my favorite chapters. Enjoy!


POST #13 WHAT DID NICK KNOW?

There’s a call and response in the literary world. It
goes like this:

Call: “unreliable narrator”

Response: “Nick Carraway”

He’s the prime example of a narrator who does not
tell you everything. He’s a Yale man, an upstanding
Middle- Westerner. While lying may be beneath
him, courteous and secret omission is not.
He lets us know in the second line of the novel that
when someone has not “had the advantages” that
he has had, he has been taught to avoid criticizing
them. And he does just that by laying out Gatsby’s
lies, but never calling them lies. For example, Nick
likely knows that Gatsby is lying about his
hometown because San Francisco is not in the
Middle-West; that the 7 th Infantry was not in the
Argonne; and that Gatsby is not a legitimate
businessman. Nick knows these things, but never
directly says to the reader that Gatsby had lied.

Even more indicative of his penchant for omission
is that Nick also doesn’t tell the other characters.
This pattern of Nick showing us the lie, but not
calling it repeats when it comes to Gatsby’s race.
It seems that Nick is suspicious of Gatsby’s race
from the start. Shortly after his tanned
skin/frequently trimmed hair observation he says: “I
would have accepted without question the
information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of
Louisiana or the lower east side of New York.”
(TGG 54) Note, not just the swamps. Not just
Louisiana. Not just New York, but the lower eastside. Why?

To this day older black New Orleans residents refer
to the “front of town” and “back of town”. The back
of town is the swampland close to Lake
Pontchartrain that flooded in Hurricane Katrina. In
Fitz’s time, free blacks and Creoles lived in the
back of town/swamp neighborhoods. (Wiki8) There
was so much racial mixture and social fluidity in
these neighborhoods that Creoles developed a
term for the racial passers: “passabone”. (Buck 85) 
If Gatsby is a passabone it is plausible that someone like him had started out from such a place, just as Nick suggests.

Nick suggests that Gatsby could also have come
from the “Five Points” neighborhoods of New York’s
lower east side. Freed black people were originally
segregated there and they stayed there until they
were pushed to Harlem in the 1920s. (Columbia1)
It’s of note that around the time of Gatsby’s birth (c.
1890) other lower east side districts that were close
to the black ones had so many German immigrants
they were called “kleindeutschland” (Columbia2).
There are hints that Gatsby is part German
because the name “Gatz” is mostly considered to
be German (Jew, Obscene 133) and his father
follows the Lutheran religion, popular in Germany.
(Slater 56) It’s easy to imagine a Gatsby of mixed
race springing from here.

Swamps or New York’s lower east side, either way
Gatsby is once again placed amongst black
populations and culture. And if it is both ways (i.e.,
he has a German father and a Creole mother), then
Gatsby is the personification of the northward
creeping negroid streak. (Thus, it makes sense within the novel’s themes that Tom has a hand in
vanquishing him. This is an example of how a black
Gatsby renders this book whole and seamless.)

Let’s re-consider the caveat: don’t criticize people
who “haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.”
We know that Nick largely doesn’t criticize Gatsby.
Based on Nick’s principles, it follows that he must
deem Gatsby to have disadvantages. Since Nick
believes that Gatsby may have come from one of
the well-established locales of free (usually lighter-
skinned) black Americans, it is possible that Nick
believes (or at least wonders) whether Gatsby’s
disadvantages go beyond class to race. But having
concluded that Gatsby is “worth the whole damn
bunch” of the “rotten crowd” (TGG 134), Nick is not
going to tell us. He is not going to let anyone else
tell us either – that’s why he calmly erases the
obscene word on the steps, a word whose
appearance didn’t seem to surprise him. Thus,
following the pattern, Nick has laid Gatsby’s biggest
lie out in front of us, but refuses to call it.

I think in the end Nick was indeed what he said he
was: a “keeper of the secret griefs of wild, unknown
men.”