A young man defined more by his losses than by any positive quality, which is a genuinely unusual choice for a protagonist. He is intelligent, loyal, sexually present, and honest — but his most important quality is his grief-capacity: he can hold enormous loss without being destroyed by it (eventually). His unreliability as narrator is different from Nick Carraway's; he withholds not because he judges but because he is still, decades later, reaching for language equal to the experience.