the waste land myth and symbols in the great gatsby

His assumption of Gatsby’s illegal activities notwithstanding, Nick has the same expectations of integrity from Gatsby and from other men as he does from himself. As he sees it, “because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there.” Although Nick realizes that because of Gatsby’s allegedly illegal activities, “under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life,” the issue of personal honor simplifies the problem for him. I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.” A sense of personal honor also leads Nick to refuse Gatsby’s offer of financial help in tacit return for Nick’s arranging a reunion between Gatsby and Daisy. For example, only paragraphs after he justifies Jordan’s dishonesty, Nick describes himself as “one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” Eventually, he ends his relationship with Jordan because of this commitment to his own honesty, telling her, “I’m thirty. In contrast to his acceptance of female deception andĭespite his willingness to suppress the truth about Daisy, Nick professes to have high personal standards of integrity. Instead, Nick judges the truth here an “unutterable fact.” He also rejects telling Daisy’s husband the truth, even though Daisy’s dishonesty implicated Tom in Gatsby and Wilson’s subsequent deaths.

Although Nick knows that it was Daisy and not Gatsby who had been driving the “death car,” he neither confronts Daisy with his knowledge nor does he consider reporting her to the police or testifying at the inquest. Nick’s tolerance of Jordan’s dishonesty foreshadows his later acceptance of his cousin Daisy’s even more devastating deception, that of allowing Gatsby to assume the blame for killing Myrtle Wilson. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply-I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.” Despite this sensitivity to Jordan’s motivation for lying, Nick immediately and easily dismisses the issue by explaining, “It made no difference to me. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. When Nick Carraway, narrator of The Great Gatsby, recognizes that his woman friend Jordan Baker was “incurably dishonest,” he first attempts to understand her deceptions:

The waste land myth and symbols in the great gatsby