Jay Gatsby - Character Biography

Character Biography

Seventeen-year-old James Gatz, hailing from North Dakota where he was born to a poor family in 1890, despises the imprecations of poverty so much he drops out of St. Olaf College in Minnesota only a few weeks into his first semester. He later explains to narrator Nick Carraway that he couldn't bear working as a janitor to support himself through college any longer. After changing his birth name to Jay Gatsby, he reunites with mentor Dan Cody, a copper tycoon who then invites him to join his ten-year yacht trek from Girl Bay. Over the next five years, Gatsby learns the ways of the wealthy until Cody's death. Cody's mistress then cheats Gatsby out of a $25,000 bequest meant for him.

In 1917, during his training to join the infantry in preparation to join World War I, 27-year-old Gatsby meets and falls in love with 18-year-old Daisy Fay, who is everything he is not: rich and from a patrician East Coast family.

During the war, Gatsby reaches the rank of Major, which commands the heavy machine guns of his regiment, and becomes decorated for valour from his participation in the Marne and the Argonne. After the war ended, he - as he tells narrator Nick Carraway years later - attends Trinity College, Oxford. While there, he receives a letter from Daisy, telling him that she has married the equally aristocratic Tom Buchanan. Gatsby then decides to commit his life to becoming a man of wealth and stature he believes would win Daisy's love.

Gatsby returns home to the US where it's being transformed by the Prohibition, a period in American history when gangsters were able to earn vast wealth and sometimes mix with the connected upper classes; an era in which "all the old boundaries that separated the classes were being broken, and a new wave of instant millionaires, like Gatsby himself... mingled with the polo-players who inhabited the stiff enclaves of the established rich of Long Island's Gold Coast." This era later came to be known as the Jazz Age after Fitzgerald's own coinage. Gatsby takes advantage of this opportunity by making a fortune from bootlegging, thanks to his association with various gangsters, such as Meyer Wolfsheim who is, as Gatsby later tells narrator Nick, "the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919."

With his vast income readily available, Gatsby purchases a 12-bedroom mansion in the fictional West Egg of Long Island, home to the nouveau riche, on the opposite side of a lake from the old-money East Egg, where Daisy Buchanan, her husband Tom and their three-year-old daughter live. At his West Egg mansion, Gatsby hosts a weekend-long party every weekend, open to all comers, as an attempt to attract Daisy as one of party guests from East Egg. Through narrator Nick Carraway, Gatsby finally has a chance to meet Daisy. Through a series of meetings, Gatsby tries to convince Daisy to leave her adulterous husband Tom as he isn't convinced Daisy's happy with her marriage.

At the Buchanans' home Jordan, Nick, Gatsby and the Buchanans decide to have a party in New York City. Tom asks Gatsby if he could borrow his yellow Rolls Royce to drive up to the city. Gatsby agrees. On the way to New York City, Tom makes a detour at a gas station in "the Valley of Ashes", a run-down part of Long Island, to fill up his tank. Garage owner George Wilson shares a concern that his wife, Myrtle, may be having an affair, but he doesn't know with whom. This unnerves Tom as Myrtle is his secret mistress and so he leaves in a hurry.

During the party in a high-class hotel suite, a casual party conversation evolves into a confrontation between Daisy, Gatsby and Tom. In a fit of anger Gatsby points out that Daisy loves him, not Tom. Daisy reveals she "did once love Tom", which forces Gatsby to realise she'll never leave Tom for him. The party breaks up with Daisy leaving NYC in Gatsby's yellow Rolls Royce as the driver with Gatsby as her passenger. Her husband Tom leave with Jordan and Nick in Jordan's car.

From her upstairs room at the gas station, Myrtle sees the approaching yellow Rolls Royce. Mistakenly believing it's Tom returning for her, she runs out to meet Tom, but the car knocks her over, killing her instantly. Panic-sickened Daisy drives away from the scene of the accident. Arriving at Daisy's home in East Egg, Gatsby promises Daisy he would take the responsibility if they were ever caught.

Myrtle's grief-sickened husband George Wilson traces the sightings of the yellow car to the Buchanan home in East Egg, then to Gatsby's home in West Egg where he fires his gun at Gatsby, killing him instantly, before taking his own life. Gatsby was 32 years old.

Of all Gatsby's high society friends, only one attends Gatsby's funeral. Also at the funeral are narrator Nick Carraway and Gatsby's father, Henry C. Gatz, who reveals to Nick that Gatsby's real name was James "Jimmy" Gatz and that he is proud of Jimmy's achievement as a self-made millionaire.

Nick later visits the Buchanans at their home. Daisy tells him they're leaving East Egg for a vacation in Europe. Tom reveals to Nick that when garage owner George Wilson confronted him over killing Myrtle with his yellow Rolls Royce, he explained it was Gatsby who owned the car. Nick realises then that Tom nurses no remorse over his part in Wilson's murder of Gatsby and that as far as the Buchanans are concerned, Gatsby no longer holds any meaning to them.