The Great Gatsby Rhetorical Analysis

In a well-written essay, analyze the rhetorical choices Nick Carraway makes when introducing his story and argue whether or not the audience should think him credible by the end of Ch.1. Nick Carraway is a credible author of the Great Gatsby as he demonstrates his intellectual abilities by being a graduate of Yale, he is a courteous man as he is very polite to Tom Buchanan when he meets him at his home, even as Tom is casually racist and bigoted, and he is a blunt man as he describes himself as being “one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (3.170) . However, by the end of Chapter One Nick’s credibility is in question as he contradicts himself while providing the forward to his novel, as the Great Gatsby is supposedly written by Carraway a year after the events unfolded in Gatsby’s world. Is Nick Carraway to be trusted as a
My only hesitation towards Nick Carraway’s telling of Gatsby’s story is his unfailing trust in Gatsby. Carraway says “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn”. Within that quote there is a clear contradiction in Carraway’s words, but I believe that Carraway was simply trying to use the rhetorical device of irony. By spending all this time retelling Gatsby’s story in a fanciful light, Carraway unconsciously hid the fact that Gatsby, at his core, embodied all of the traits that he felt made people the scum of the earth. Gatsby is filthy rich, literally, and he has only one superficial care in the world, a married former debutante. Gatsby’s story may have been told in a better light as a result of Carraway becoming a victim to hindsight bias, which is when an event is changed in ones memory to make the result more predictable, despite there have been little or no objective basis for the original