You.

You.

I have been waiting for you.

My fellow hellsite Gatsby enthusiasts, I present to you my first semester English final;

The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest examples of an unreliable narrator, and in consequence, has possibly the best grounds for a viable queer theory thanks to the deceptive Nick Carraway and his internalized fondness for Jay Gatsby. Nick is terribly dishonest to both the reader and himself at most turns. He paints himself in the best light he can, shields the reader's view from what he assumes is undesirable, but he’s admittedly horrible at it, slipping up frequently enough for it to be glaring. Nick and Gatsby’s bond is formed entirely on Gatsby’s lies and later honesty, and cannot go beyond that both due to Gatsby’s death and Nick’s own restraint on his emotions and passions. Nick comments on how he is “... slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires…” (Fitzgerald 64), and that kind of restraint is found often in queer people, and would be especially applicable in the American 1920s. His biased adoration and blind devotion to Gatsby is even mentioned at the very beginning, “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction” (Fitzgerald 2). Nick lying to the reader can also be him lying to himself, trying to convince himself that his affection for Gatsby was sheerly platonic, and the constant refute― and accidental disproving― that Gatsby is the only exception to his “strict moral code” comes across as violently self-preserving. This preservation is highly suspect in most scenarios, however if Nick is to be interpreted as queer, this becomes not just understandable, but entirely necessary.

Nick Carraway's utter fascination― leaning heavily into infatuation― with Gatsby forms despite being aware of Gatsby’s lies. He meets Gatsby after being fed various outlandish rumors by various party guests, going on to describe his smile as “...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 faced―  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 so 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” (Fitzgerald 48). Though Gatsby trusts Nick, even going as far as to entrust him with the story of James Gatz, he is chasing after the metaphorical ghost of Daisy Buchanan, going after her and away from Nick, who understands him, trusts him, and does not think less of him. Nick is aware of the immorality of everything that creates Gatsby, from the bootlegging, to reckless driving, to the affair with a married woman, and trying to convince said married woman to run away from her husband and child with him. Nick is the only person in Gatsby's life aware of all of this, an active participant despite his insistence that he is unbiased. He claims desperately that he disapproves of Gatsby, but even is his attempts to hide his adoring bias, he describes Gatsby as having “something gorgeous about him” and “a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again” (Fitzgerald 4). Despite Gatsby’s admittedly horrible moral code, Nick says that “Gatsby turned out all right at the end…” (Fitzgerald 4), and even goes so far as to have his sole compliment to him be “They’re a rotten crowd… You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together” (Fitzgerald 154). Nick doesn’t disapprove of Gatsby, he puts the man on a pedestal far above anyone else. 

I'd like to mention that we were in fact not supposed to have written this out beforehand, but I'm too enthusiastic for my own good

Wrote a two paragraph essay for a final about how Nick from The Great Gatsby is super gay for Gatsby and got a perfect score is this how it feels to be god