Mikayla Coenen
English 10
February 14, 2014
Don't critique others
In The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are many life lessons you can find, whether by looking at someone like Tom, Gatsby, Daisy, or even by Nick. These lessons are everywhere, and sometimes are pretty obvious, and sometimes hard to figure out. Despite his stance as an observer, someone who hardly joins into the action too much, Nick has his own little shares of life lessons. One of those lessons is shown right in the first paragraph. What's the life lesson, you ask? Don't critique others.
In the very first paragraph, we are greeted with these sentences from Nick, quoting his father, "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'" It's these sentences that grab you, pull you in, and stick inside your head the whole book. In fact, it makes the narrator, Nick, all the more noticeable when he reserves his judgement.
In another part of the book, it is admitted that critiquing someone who may or may not have had all the advantages he had is something he finds himself unable to do. Because of that, he is able to truly befriend Gatsby, something very few people even attempt to try, not for the difficulty, but because of how they had already started judging Gatsby, not even from knowing the man himself, but rather from rumors.
So, in conclusion, The Great Gatsby can offer a number of lessons, one of them being "Don't critique others", being shown by the narrator Nick. Nick mentions his inability to critique others throughout the book, save for the very end, when mentioning Daisy, Tom, and Jordan and their implied ridiculous and hypocritical ways. However, he still manages to remain nonjudgmental and befriends Gatsby, something nobody has truly done. So, in the end, it's best to not critique others, since you yourself do not truly know them, not until you've become their friend.
