In Chapter 8 of the Great Gatsby

In chapter 8 of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald divides the narrative into three narrative frames. In the first narrative frame the story centres around Gatsby’s story of how he met Daisy, as retold by Nick, the narrator. The second narrative frame involves Nick going about his business in the city and ending his relationship with Jordan. The third narrative tells more of the aftermath of Myrtle’s death, Wilson’s determination to seek revenge, ultimately leading to the climactic moment of the novel: Gatsby’s death, followed by Wilson’s suicide. Fitzgerald effectively uses the technique of multiple narrative frames to demonstrate how a number of separate events occur within a very short space of time, or even at the same time. The result is that equal weighting is given to each event and the reader is given a full picture of the climactic events of the novel as all of the mysteries and insinuations throughout the novel are revealed in their entirety.
 
The first narrative frame contains a mixture of continuous prose and direct speech from Gatsby, who makes occasional interjections in Nick’s narrative to continue the story, for example, “I can’t tell you how surprised I was to find out I loved her” followed soon after by the reintroduction of Nick’s narrative, describing events in the third person, “on the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy”. The use of the past tense by both Gatsby and Nick in this section of the narrative reinforces a retrospective time frame, where the characters within the story are recounting an event, which happened before the chronological time of the actual novel. This makes the section of the narrative a digression into Gatsby’s past, developing the character rather than the plot. The details are about Gatsby’s past in this section also reveal the mystery surrounding him, putting to rest the many rumours which have been put forward by minor characters throughout the novel. For both Nick and the reader, these...