is
not a reliable narrator despite his protestations that honesty is his
"cardinal" virtue. He states:
I am one of the
few honest people that I have ever known.
Fitzgerald
clearly wants us to see this as an unintentionally ironic statement on Nick's part that shows
his self-blindness. In fact, not two lines before, Nick had been explaining to us how he was
not being honest with the girl back home:
I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them: "Love, Nick," and all
I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration
appeared on her upper lip.
In other words, he has been
dishonestly signing "love" in letters to a young woman back home who, in fact, leaves
him with a faint distaste: he doesn't love her at all. When he says earlier in the same chapter
thatis "incurably dishonest," that might be true, but it also might represent a
projection of his own character flaw onto another person.
It is a truism in
literature that when a person...
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