Father's Advice

Father's Advice is the opening principle of Nick Carraway's narration in The Great Gatsby, a piece of counsel from his father that establishes Nick's self-proclaimed habit of reserving judgment and frames the moral perspective from which the entire story is told. The advice is delivered in the novel's first sentence and immediately sets the tone for Nick's role as a narrator who is both tolerant and, by his own admission, limited in his capacity for moral condemnation. It is the foundational rule that governs his interactions with the novel's characters and his ultimate assessment of Jay Gatsby.

Content and Context

The advice is given by Nick's father during Nick's "younger and more vulnerable years." The father tells him, "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." Nick notes that his father said no more, but that they have "always been unusually communicative in a reserved way," and Nick understood that his father meant a great deal more than what was said. This single sentence becomes the cornerstone of Nick's narrative persona: he claims to be "inclined to reserve all judgments," a habit that has opened up many curious natures to him but also made him the victim of not a few veteran bores. The advice is presented as a matter of inherited wisdom, passed down from father to son, and Nick repeats it with a snobbish awareness that "a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."

Nick's Application and Its Limits

Nick immediately demonstrates how he applies this advice, noting that the abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality of non-judgment when it appears in a normal person. He recounts that in college he was unjustly accused of being a politician because he was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men, most of whose confidences were unsought. He admits to feigning sleep, preoccupation, or hostile levity when he sensed an intimate revelation was coming, because the intimate revelations of young men are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. However, Nick also confesses that his tolerance has a limit. He states that conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point he does not care what it is founded on. This limit is explicitly tied to his return from the East, when he wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever, and wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

The Exception of Gatsby

The most significant application of the advice—and its most notable exception—is Nick's treatment of Jay Gatsby. Nick declares that only Gatsby was exempt from his reaction against the East, even though Gatsby represented everything for which Nick has an unaffected scorn. Nick explains that if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about Gatsby, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness, Nick insists, had nothing to do with flabby impressionability but was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness he has never found in any other person. Nick concludes that Gatsby turned out all right at the end, and that it was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams, that temporarily closed out Nick's interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. This framing, directly following the statement of his father's advice, establishes that Nick's judgment of Gatsby will be filtered through this inherited principle of tolerance, even as he acknowledges his own scorn for everything Gatsby represents.

Thematic Significance

Father's Advice functions as the novel's moral compass, but one that is deliberately set askew. It introduces the central tension between judgment and sympathy, between the desire to condemn and the effort to understand. Nick's father's words are a call to empathy based on class privilege—the recognition that not everyone has had the same advantages. Yet Nick himself admits that this tolerance has limits, and that he ultimately found the East, and the people in it, wanting. The advice thus becomes a lens through which Nick views the entire narrative, allowing him to be both a participant and an observer, both enchanted and repelled. It is the rule that enables him to tell Gatsby's story with a mixture of admiration and moral disapproval, and it is the rule that, by his own admission, he ultimately fails to apply to Tom and Daisy Buchanan, whom he condemns as careless people who smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money. The advice, then, is not a static principle but a dynamic one that Nick tests, modifies, and ultimately abandons in the face of the novel's tragic events.