The protagonist in Fitzgerald’s short story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is John T. Unger. He is a teenager from the Mississippi River town of Hades who attends a boarding school near Boston and narrates the story’s central adventure from an outsider’s perspective.
Unger is invited west by his schoolmate Percy Washington, whose family secretly controls an enormous diamond mountain in Montana. The Washingtons’ wealth depends on keeping the discovery hidden, and their isolated estate combines extravagant luxury with imprisonment, violence, and the preservation of slavery through a fabricated version of Civil War history.
Unger falls in love with Kismine Washington and eventually learns that the family intends to kill him so he cannot reveal their secret. He escapes with Kismine and her sister Jasmine after an attack destroys the Washington estate. Readers sometimes confuse Unger with Percy Washington, whose invitation drives the plot, or with Gatsby and Nick Carraway, characters from Fitzgerald’s better-known novels.