When Nick Carraway, narrator of The Great Gatsby, recognizes that his woman friend Jordan Baker was "incurably dishonest," he first attempts to understand her deceptions:

She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.

Despite this sensitivity to Jordan's motivation for lying, Nick immediately and easily dismisses the issue by explaining, "It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot."

Nick's tolerance of Jordan's dishonesty foreshadows his later acceptance of his cousin Daisy's even more devastating deception, that of allowing Gatsby to assume the blame for killing Myrtle Wilson. Although Nick knows that it was Daisy and not Gatsby who had been driving the "death car," he neither confronts Daisy with his knowledge nor does he consider reporting her to the police or testifying at the inquest. He also rejects telling Daisy's husband the truth, even though Daisy's dishonesty implicated Tom in Gatsby and Wilson's subsequent deaths. Instead, Nick judges the truth here an "unutterable fact."