Gatsby and Wealth

Gatsby’s Journey to Find Wealth While Jay Gatsby is seen as fabulously wealthy, Fitzgerald shows how he came into being simply from one mans impoverished dream. James Gatz’s parents were shiftless unsuccessful farmers. Gatz never accepted nor claimed they were his parents, as he did not feel he belonged in the lower class of society. Gatz grew old enough to be on his own and thus started his transformation from James Gatz, the son of two unsuccessful parents, to Jay Gatsby, a wealthy member of the upper class. Ever since he felt he did not belong to two unsuccessful famers, he would visualize who he would want to become in the wealthy upper class society. “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg of Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself” (98). At the age of 17 Gatsby had a desire to achieve a high, wealthy status in society, and indeed he did. Gatsby was perturbed when people asked about his long forgotten past and how he obtained his wealth. He did not want to relive memories of his embarrassing past, so easily he told everyone who asked, “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West – all dead now” (65). He then continues with a speech concluding it was a “family tradition” to be educated at Oxford college. Gatsby could not simply tell people he had gathered his money from illegal bonds and his proper educative sounding tone was from a man by the name of Dan Cody. If he had told people the truth about his unsuccessful past as a child, his transformed platonic image of Jay Gatsby would be demolished. What he promised himself at the beginning of the transformation, of never returning as James Gatz, would prove himself to be a failure.
Dan Cody, a man who was important towards the choices Gatsby made during his transformation, took him to Duluth and purchased Gatsby a blue coat, six pairs of duck trousers, and a yachting cap; thus completing part of the transformation, his wealthy of high status appearance. Nick Carraway says,