The Cardinal Virtues

While I don't care much if at all about authorial intent (this YouTube video sums it up for me), I do spend a little mental energy, sometimes, on what authors KNOW.  At the end of chapter three of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's narrator Nick Carraway says this:

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.

This is an interesting sentiment in context.  Jordan Baker has just "deliberately shifted" their relationship, provided Nick with what Captain Jack Sparrow would call an "opportune moment," and Nick remembered the Minnesota girlfriend he is currently quite actively avoiding, you know, the one who develops a "faint mustache of perspiration" when she plays tennis.  (#dealbreaker)  He wants out, but he's not out.  I have told you--and I'm right--that cowardice is speaking.

Now I want to tell you something else I'm right about--something you may have learned as you plodded through the last two years of literature classes.  The Cardinal Virtues  are as follows: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance.

Prudence is wisdom.  It is reason applied to action.
Justice is giving everyone what they are due.
Fortitude is courage.
Temperance is self-control.

Nick claims that honesty is his cardinal virtue.  It is NOT a cardinal virtue.  And our writer knows that.

It could be argued that Nick is exhibiting a certain level of justice here and a modicum of temperance.  (It can also be argued that at no point in this book at all has Nick exhibited that he has a molecule of fortitude in his entire body.  But I digress.)  One thing that can't be argued is that Nick is in any way honest.  He's even lying about the cardinal virtues. 

A lot happens in chapter four.  We have an incredibly awkward ride from West Egg to Manhattan.  We have an awkward lunch with a strange gangster.  We have the Daisy backstory, flowing from the lips of her old friend and golf cheat Jordan Baker.  We have Nick, who has already hung out with Tom and his mistress Myrtle agreeing to arrange an "encounter" between Daisy and her old flame Jay Gatsby.

And Nick decides to kiss Jordan. 

I have often wondered what has changed such that, to borrow Nick's own phrase, the "interior rules that act as brakes" are no longer restricting him.  Perhaps you know.

At any rate, as much as I don't like Nick at THIS point in the story, I like him just fine at the end.  Not to drop any spoilers, but the things he says and thinks about himself in these early chapters are more or less true at the end.  He becomes a much more honorable man.

But he can't turn honesty into a Cardinal Virtue. 

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