The Great Gatsby

Michiyo Wood

Lyons

English 4

2 April 1, 2014

The Great Gatsby Literacy Essay

People never really are how they look. There’s always that one step and only after that step occurs are people truly true. In the book, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby is a mysterious character that throws all of these parties but never really showed his self. Only when the girl of his dreams comes into play does he show his true colors. When Jay Gatsby begins he begins with nothing. Not even with the name “Jay Gatsby”. In the end, no one is the same as in the beginning.

He begins as James Gatz, a little farm boy from North Dakota, who already had bigger plans for himself since he didn’t consider his parents his actual parents because they were dirt poor. So “he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a 17 year old boy would likely to invent” (Fitzgerald 98) and left to be on his own. After he leaves, “the beginning of his career” begins as he finds a “yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior”(Fitzgerald 98). When Gatsby rowed out to the yacht to warn him that a wind might catch him and break him he met Dan Cody. Dan Cody has been on every rush for metal since ’75 and that’s what made him a millionaire. Cody asked Gatsby a few things and found out that he’s ambitious so he “took him to Duluth and bought him a blue coax, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap” (Fitzgerald 100) and hired him as steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor. After 5 years, Cody died and Gatsby inherited twenty-five thousand dollars or so he thought. A lady named Ella Kaye visited Cody a week before his death and Gatsby “didn’t get it. He never understood the legal device used against him, but what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye” (Fitzgerald 100). Gatsby didn’t get money but he learned a lot from Cody even though he was a drunk.

Being more knowledgeable, Gatsby decided to join the military after Cody’s’ death. Gatsby...