"'. . . in ecstatic cahoots': Nick’s Authoring of Gatsby"

After pointing out how, in "The Great Gatsby," Nick presents three artistic visualizations of Jay Gatsby – as a young man from the provinces, as a would-be carnival king and as a romantic character (in the Bakhtinian sense) – I narrow my focus to the third of these visualizations. I argue that Bakhtin’s theories in "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (1924-1927) give us the concepts and patterns that best enable us to understand Nick’s strategies in the strand of his narrative that traces the process by which he achieves and gives form to his understanding of Gatsby’s inner self.