The William Trevor Reader: “Family Sins”
Fingers crossed, with 10 stories remaining, “Family Sins” will be the last of a type of first-person story in . We have already encountered this type of story several times with and perhaps a couple of others. In short, we have the Nick Carraway-esque first-person camera narrator about whom we learn virtually nothing, who tells someone else’s story and discreetly exits stage right. This storytelling position is not always bad: in the case of , it to wryly observe and comment on the rich from the corner of the party, a position one imagines he enjoyed. Crucially, it also ends with Carraway’s disgust with everything he’s seen—the destruction of Gatsby’s dreams parallels the destruction of Nick’s illusions that the rich are better than the rest of us and that gilded fantasy lands like West Egg are worth infiltrating.
