How would F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby be different if it were told by Gatsby instead of Nick?

It’s hard to know how Fitzgerald would have written things if Gatsby had been the narrator. Nick serves as a kind of moral center for the book. He’s an observer -- someone who can “see through” the pretensions of the other characters and keep the story more or less in line. Nick is the one who sees Tom’s brutishness, Daisy and Jordan’s essential dishonesty, and Gatsby’s idealism. He’s not exactly an impartial observer; Nick is...

It’s hard to know how Fitzgerald would have written things if Gatsby had been the narrator. Nick serves as a kind of moral center for the book. He’s an observer -- someone who can “see through” the pretensions of the other characters and keep the story more or less in line. Nick is the one who sees Tom’s brutishness, Daisy and Jordan’s essential dishonesty, and Gatsby’s idealism. He’s not exactly an impartial observer; Nick is sympathetic with Gatsby, but only up to a point. Lose Nick, and you lose those perspectives.

Maybe one way to think about how the book would be different would be to consider the pivotal scene where Gatsby is telling Nick about Daisy, and Nick makes a remark about how Gatsby “can’t repeat the past.” Gatsby replies, “Why of course you can!” We are meant to see Gatsby’s response as unrealistic, or deluded. But if you take away Nick, the point of this passage simply becomes “of course we can repeat the past.” Gatsby’s story might not be any different, but our understanding and relation to it would totally change. As the narrator, Gatsby would recount, in detail, his quest to win Daisy back; the Daisy we would meet would be an idealized figure; Tom would simply become an obstacle; Jordan would barely register; Myrtle and Wilson would hardly be in the book; his dealings with Wolfsheim would perhaps be less mysterious. In short, our understanding of these characters would be a lot less well-rounded, and our understanding of Gatsby would shift from seeing him as the victim of a morally empty society to seeing him, mostly, as a kind of “stalker.” I don’t think the book would be nearly as good!