How the global jquery object works

How the global jquery object works

How does the main prototype/object/function in jQuery work? Mainly it operates as though it's a function and an object, and I can't figure out how. ie:

$('.container')

or

$.get('some api')

There is clearly a jQuery function that returns an init function from the prototype, but I can't quite figure out how to put it all together so that the constructor can be bypassed and you can access other methods on the prototype. Would anyone mind explaining quickly?