James Gatz was born in the Midwest, in North Dakota. Even when Gatsby was just a boy living in the Midwest he loathed being poor and he hoped dreamed for wealth and sophistication. Gatsby was so very determined to reinvent himself that he even made a schedule. "Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something. Do you notice what he 's got about improving his mind? He was always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat him for it." (Pg 143)
James Gatz went onto Dan Cody 's boat and from that moment on James Gatz was gone. Dan Cody was the man who showed Gatsby the high life and was his “mentor”. By the time he was a young man, around thirty years old, he had succeeded from an impoverished childhood in North Dakota to become the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby which he stayed true to, until the moment that he died.
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about His Father 's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just 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.” (Pg 80)
Fitzgerald in the beginning of the novel presents Gatsby as the mysterious host of the incredibly luxurious parties thrown at his mansion. Gatsby appears to be surrounded