Jay Gatsby Research Paper

The Remarkable Identity of Jay Gatsby Jay Gatsby was known for his wild and extravagant parties. Partygoers would gossip about how he became so wealthy. Maybe he was a relative of Kaiser Wilhelm or he was a bootlegger. No one knows for sure, not even Jay Gatsby. However, Gatsby did have a vision for his identity. Figuring out who you are can be hard, but Jay Gatsby figured it out from a very young age, he just needed the resources to become “Jay Gatsby.” Jay Gatsby lived multiple different lives. His birth name was James Gatz. His parents were poor farmers who were constantly moving, but he never really thought of them as his parents. (Fitzgerald 84) By the age of seventeen, he had changed his name to “Jay Gatsby” and had the foresight of who he wanted to be. “He had changed it at the age of seventeen and the

Partygoers can count on great food, strong drinks, and melodious music. These parties were huge social events that contained a mixed crowd and most of them had never met Gatsby. (Fitzgerald 35-36) He wanted these parties to always have a bewildering characteristic so that people would talk about them. He wanted to attract the eyes of Daisy Buchanan once again to prove that he could be what she needed. His huge house just happened to be across the water from Buchanan’s. Gatsby wanted these parties to be so great that maybe Daisy would stumble in. One night Nick caught a glimpse of Gatsby holding hands out in the distance, reaching for a green light that just happened to be at the end of The Buchanan’s dock. One could also speculate it was a great metaphor: The light at the end of the dock serves as a perfect metaphor here, bringing Daisy closer to Gatsby in a process of optical magnification; because the light is physically close but also ‘as close as a star to the moon,’ the description fittingly analogizes Gatsby’s relationship to his