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How Is Jay Gatz Portrayed In The Great Gatsby

771 Words4 Pages

Through the Facade
The America dream, once rife with assurance and affluence, consumes the innocuous dreamers into greed and corruption. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, James Gatz is captivated by the empty promises of the 1920s American dream and love story, especially that of Daisy Fay. To pursue his ambitions, Gatz sacrifices his values, as a means of personifying his idyllic rendition of Jay Gatsby. Through the failures and successes of Gatsby, James Gatz persists underneath the façade with no success in embodying Gatsby. As such, Gatz’s representation of his idealistic self falls short of the expectations of the West Eggers and the East Eggers, failing to assimilate in his new lifestyle. Although it was Jay Gatsby who dominates …show more content…

Through Gatz’s “Platonic conception of himself,” his apparition of the ideal man steams from carefully crafting his demeanor, appearance, and values (Fitzgerald 98). This artificial rendition does not serve as a representation of James Gatz because Gatsby does not coincide with the hard work and perseverance that goes into achieving Gatz’s dreams. As a result, the “James Gatz of North Dakota had dreamed a special version of the American dream,” and Gatz’s aspirations becomes contorted as his synthetic embodiment of Jay Gatsby brings corruption and effortless means (Trask). As such, the conception of Jay Gatsby does not serve as an apparition to James Gatz’s values which he holds …show more content…

The girl that Gatsby has once loved has been “short of his dreams- not through her own fault, but because of the constant vitality of his illusions,” and it is James Gatz who has gone into loving Daisy, but the high expectations of Jay Gatsby which ruins that love for her (Fitzgerald 95). As such, Gatsby’s hope to salvage her love proves to be meaningless as "his gift for hope, as it turns out, is Gatsby’s curse as well as his blessing," and so "it insulates him from the rational and experiential restraints" which causes him to be blinded by any form of rejection in his conscious when it comes to Daisy (Steinbrink). Gatz’s love for Daisy encompasses the basic foundation that makes James Gatz more genuine than Jay

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