Scott Fitzgerald wrote the novel The Great Gatsby, he used a unique writing technique. It used a first-person point of view in the form of a narrator, Nick Carraway, who was also involved in the story. This style allowed the author to withhold any information that he did not present to the narrator in the story, causing the reader to learn things the same way the narrator did. The protagonist in The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, was revealed to the narrator, Nick, gradually throughout the course of the novel. On the surface, Jay Gatsby appeared to be extremely wealthy and generally happy with his place in life, and this is how he appears to Nick at the beginning of the novel. Gatsby threw big parties and people were not invited; they just showed up, as explained by Nick on page 45: "I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited-they went there"(45). As Nick began to know Gatsby better, he began to realize there was s!.
omething wrong with Gatsby. Gatsby was obviously unhappy, but the reader was not told why. When Nick goes to New York with Gatsby and meets Meyer Wolfshiem, the reader is given some suspicion that Jay is involved in illegal dealings, because of the hints that Meyer Wolfshiem drops and the things Jay tells Nick about Meyer. The reader is finally told why Gatsby is unhappy at the end of chapter four, when Jordan Baker tells Nick about Gatsby's love for Daisy. The next major revelation about Gatsby does not happen to Nick until much later, but the author decided to place it earlier in the novel so the reader could understand what was going on more easily. Jay Gatsby tells Nick about where he came from, how he got there, and why he got there. Nick realizes that Gatsby is so in love with Daisy that he is crazy and will do anything to get her. It has consumed his life so much that he spent five years leading an illegal life just because of her.