Nick Carraway's Loss Of Identity In The Great Gatsby

In the novel written by Sarah Dessen, What Happened to Goodbye, the protagonist often changes her identity. She becomes a new person every time she moves. Though the protagonist is suffering an identity crisis, she still lets her environment impact her personality. In this way, What Happened to Goodbye relates to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, he emphasizes the theme of creating a new self to explain how time and the atmosphere affect a person's actions.

F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates how an environment and time affect a person’s actions for the better or for the worse by the way Jay Gatsby presents himself to the people around him. Nick Carraway, the protagonist, has been introduced

Scott Fitzgerald illustrates how occasion and situation can affect an individuals’ actions through the way Gatsby chooses to present and adorn his house. Owl Eyes, a guest at one of Jay Gatsby’s many summer parties, emphasizes the books in Gatsby’s study and drunkenly declares, “’Absolutely real – have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and – Here! Lemme show you’ Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the ‘Stoddard Lectures.’ ‘See!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It’s a bona-fide piece of print matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too – didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?’” (Fitzgerald 46). Owl Eyes emphasizing repeatedly that the books were “absolutely real” and in fact not cardboard. These comments illustrate that Gatsby is trying to be, if not actually, a scholar. When Owl Eyes doesn’t make a big deal over the fact that Gatsby “didn’t cut the pages”, it disproves the hypothesis that he is, in fact, a scholarly person. The way Owl Eyes speaks about Gatsby makes it seem like he knows who Gatsby really is. In accordance with Owl Eyes’ plight about the books, Nick Carraway observes Gatsby as he shows Daisy around his house, saying, “He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revaluated everything in his house according to

Nick Carraway begins to understand who Gatsby is and where he came from and expresses that, “James Gatz – that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that he witnessed the beginning of his career – when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior” (Fitzgerald 98). Carraway explains that Jay Gatsby is no more than a mask and costume that one James Gatz wears from day to day to hide his origins and create a new life for him. Gatsby himself was a cover-up, just like his house and use of the books in the study. The fact that the start James Gatz’s second life is referred to as “the beginning of his career” exposes that Gatsby is no more than a mere act. Gatsby was a way for Gatz to live the life he had always wanted after being exposed to the wonders of being rich. “Dan Cody’s yacht” can be seen as a metaphor for the life of a high-class individual. It can also be seen as what it physically is, the yacht of the man that sparked the career of Jay Gatsby. Along with Gatsby’s origin story, during his car ride with Gatsby, Nick Carraway takes careful note of the considerable change in the way of life after the bridge to New York is passed, and declares, “As we crossed Blackwell’s Island, a limousine passed us, driven by