Jay Gatsby

The novel, The Great Gatsby focuses on one of the focal characters, James Gatz, also known as Jay Gatsby. He grew up in North Dakota to a family of poor farm people and as he matured, eventually worked for a wealthy man named Dan Cody. As Gatsby is taken under Cody’s wing, he gains more than even he bargained for. He comes across a large sum of money, however ends up getting tricked out of ‘inheriting’ it. After these obstacles, he finds a new way to earn his money, even though it means bending the law to obtain it. Some people will go to a lot of trouble in order to achieve things at all costs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby, conveys the numerous traits of Jay Gatsby through the incidents he faces, how he voices himself and the alterations he undergoes through the progression of the novel. Gatsby possesses many traits that help him develop as a key character in the novel: ambitious, kind-hearted and deceitful all of which is proven through various incidents that arise in the novel.

Gatsby encompasses many physiognomies such as ambitious. Ambitious outlines one who is eagerly desirous of achieving or obtaining success, Jay Gatsby. It is evident that Gatsby generates his own fantasy world, a realm where he is not the underprivileged James Gatz, but the fantasized Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald conceives him as, “… the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end” (98). This quote expresses how he dreams up a new world to escape the blandness of his own existence. But his imagination and turmoil pays off because he ends up making his dreams reality. He personifies a man who goes from “rags to riches” because he strives to better himself as opposed t...

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...n the end Gatsby depicts all of these traits which are the reason why he faces such a tragic end. In the eyes of the narrator, Nick states, “Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men,” (2), which expresses what his perspective of Gatsby was. It is never suspected that one must face death so abruptly but everything happens for a reason. Gatsby’s traits are illuminated throughout all of his reactions towards the incidents he faces, the statements he makes and the developments he undergoes through the course of the novel. Even though he made his living by participating in immoral things, Gatsby did have good intentions. But in the end he confronted consequences he, himself, had never anticipated.