Jay Gatsby Vs. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby
Jay Gatsby Vs. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby
Jay Gatsby.
Jay Gatsby's real name was James Gatz and his parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people from North Dakota. He changed his name when he was seventeen and at that exact same age he invented his new self according to a model that would make a seventeen-year-old boy proud. He worked as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher along the south shore of Lake Superior. "He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted". But all these women weren't what you'd call "nice" girls. "His heart was in a constant and turbulent riot" and he had "the most grotesque and fantastic conceits" at night. He dreamed and fantasized and "for a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the reality of unreality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing". Afterwards he worked as a janitor at a small Lutheran college of St. Olaf's in southern Minnesota but soon he returned to Lake Superior again. He then met Dan Cody, a millionaire who liked him because he was "quick and extravagantly ambitious". Cody bought Gatsby some new clothes and took him with him on his yacht the Tuolomee. For five years he was employed in a vague personal capacity being in turn a steward, mate, skipper, secretary and even jailor. During this time the boat went three times around the Continent. After five years however Dan Cody died. "It was indirectly due to him that Gatsby drank so little" for he had seen what happened to people who drank. He inherited 25 000 dollars from Cody but he never got the money and all he was left with was "his singularly appropriate education". And then he met Daisy who was the first "nice" girl he had ever known. At first he found her excitingly desirable with her beautiful house and her casual manner towards it as though it were the most natural thing in the world to live in such a place. "It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy - it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about...