The Main Man "F. Scott Fitzgerald"

The structure of The Great Gatsby is extraordinary because of Fitzgerald’s brilliant manipulation of what is called the partially, or partly involved, narrator, Nick. Usually the narrator of the novel, if there’s a narrator, it’s the hero. . . But as in the work of Joseph Conrad, which I think Fitzgerald learned a great deal from, the narrator of The Great Gatsby is a minor character, but he’s there to document what happens. There is no scene at which Nick is not present. When Nick has to tell us something about Gatsby’s past, he tells us when Gatsby told it to him, the occasion, the circumstances under which Gatsby told it to him. The structure, the organization of The Great Gatsby is virtually perfect. There are some chronological glitches—sometimes he’s off a couple of days or a week. If you take the whole novel apart and you put a chart on the wall, which I’ve done, there are too many things in the space of one summer.
(The Big Read Blog)