Research Paper On Jay Gatsby

“Human beings have the unalienable right to invent themselves.” The characters throughout F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby illustrates this quote in multiple ways, but one character does so more than any other character. And that character is Jay Gatsby. Through Jay Gatsby’s actions, including creating a new persona, and essentially living a lie all for one person, Fitzgerald demonstrates how he agrees that humans have the inalienable right to invent themselves.

By creating his new persona, Jay Gatsby shows how people can rightfully invent themselves however they please. On multiple occasions, Gatsby presents us with how he invented the persona that we know as “Jay Gatsby” through either stories or characters asking questions. Late in

He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career.” (Fitzgerald 98). Through this, it’s uncovered how Gatsby changed his name to fit his new persona, his new career. Being known as the poor farmer, James Gatz, wasn’t very pleasing to him. On the contrary, being known as the billionaire, Jay Gatsby, did. And he became just that. Soon after, Gatsby’s entire persona is exposed when Nick finds out that “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

While talking to Nick about his past, Gatsby tells him “I’ll tell you God’s truth [...] I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West - all dead now. I was brought up in America, but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.” (Fitzgerald 65). Although it is later discovered to be a lie when the truth decisively tells us how “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people.” (Fitzgerald 98). Yet, the part about Oxford isn’t all false, seeing how he did actually attend Oxford after the war, but dropped out after only a few months. Shortly after this first lie, he again lies to Nick when he says “After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe - Paris, Venice, Rome - collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.” (Fitzgerald 65-66). Through this conversation with Nick as well as later revelations, Gatsby shows just how much he has truly put into this new persona, and is also willing to lie to his closest friends to uphold this new