A study in gender roles and narrator reliability in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, `The Great Gatsby.`
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, characterizes society in America in the 1920’s by looking at the lives of key residents of suburban New York and how they relate to one another. The paper shows that Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, is an important character in the book, since the reader sees everyone else through his biased eye, but he is not a man of great means or any particularly special quality. In this paper, the author looks at issues related to the gender roles in the novel, and how they reflect the patriarchal society set forth in the novel. The paper also focuses on issues of narrator reliability as they relate to gender and the patriarchy.
The single girls in this scene are wild and uninhibited. They are the type of women who entertain the men at the party; however, women are also portrayed as small and insignificant. Later at the same party, two women, described as highly indignant, are carried off by their husbands, kicking the whole way (Fitzgerald 56). This type of treatment shows that despite the allowances women are given to act independently at the party, they are still under men’s control when all is said and done.