The Great Gatsby Reading Blog #1

In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway seems to be both the protagonist and the hero of the story. He writes (having given the impression that it was he who wrote the book) that he is "inclined to reserve all judgements," (p. 1) as well as the fact that he "is one of the few honest people that [he has] ever known" (p. 59). This leaves him with a sense of honor that the audience cannot help but like; he is simply someone who does right.
Jordan Baker, to whom Nick was introduced by his cousin, Daisy, seems to be an antihero. She is extraordinarily dishonest and has cheated in a golf tournament-and yet Nick and the audience still seem to like her.  Nick says that "she was incurably dishonest. 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." (p. 58) In saying this, he implies that she seems to have grown up with this dishonesty and was unable to let go of it.
Gatsby himself is a mystery so far in the book. He seems to be a bit of a hero due to the description of his personality; "He smiled understandingly...one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It face-or seemed to face-the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey." This implies that he has an aura of simple understanding-and yet, at the beginning of the novel, he seemed to be a complete mystery to Nick, leaving the reader with mixed feelings about Gatsby and his intentions.