Duluth

Duluth, a port city on Lake Superior in Minnesota, occupies a small but decisive place in the biography of Jay Gatsby. It was there, in the summer of his seventeenth year, that the newly renamed Gatsby received from Dan Cody the material trappings of the identity he had invented for himself—a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap—and from there that he sailed away on the Tuolomee toward the West Indies and the Barbary Coast, leaving behind the shiftless farm people who had been his parents and the half-fierce, half-lazy labor of clamming and salmon-fishing along the south shore of the lake.

The Purchase and the Transformation

Cody, a fifty-year-old product of the Nevada silver fields and the Yukon gold rushes, had taken the young James Gatz aboard his yacht at Little Girls Point after the boy rowed out to warn him that a wind might break up the boat. Impressed by Gatsby's quickness and extravagant ambition, Cody brought him to Duluth a few days later. There, in the city's shops, he bought Gatsby the clothes that would mark his passage from a ragged beachcomber in a torn green jersey and canvas pants into the polished young man who would serve as steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor on Cody's voyages. The purchase was more than a wardrobe change; it was the first concrete investment in the persona Gatsby had already conceived for himself, the son of God about his Father's business.

The Five-Year Apprenticeship

From Duluth, Gatsby embarked on a five-year arrangement that took the Tuolomee three times around the continent. During those years Cody, increasingly aware that his own soft-mindedness made him vulnerable to the women who tried to separate him from his money, reposed more and more trust in his young protégé. Gatsby learned to navigate the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon that Cody represented, and he formed the habit of letting liquor alone—a discipline that would later set him apart from his own guests. The apprenticeship ended only when Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, came aboard in Boston and, a week later, Dan Cody died.

The Legacy That Never Arrived

Cody left Gatsby a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars, but Gatsby never received it. The legal device used against him—whatever it was—remained something he never understood, and the millions went intact to Ella Kaye. What Gatsby carried away from Duluth and the Cody years was not money but an education: the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man. The photograph of Cody in yachting costume that later hung in Gatsby's bedroom, a gray, florid man with a hard, empty face, served as a permanent reminder of the pioneer debauchee who had given him his start and of the fortune that had slipped through his fingers.

Narrative Significance

Duluth functions in the novel as the geographical hinge between James Gatz, the North Dakota farm boy who had spent a year beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior, and Jay Gatsby, the figure who would buy a mansion on Long Island Sound and dedicate himself to the recovery of Daisy Buchanan. It is the place where the invented self received its first official costume and where the five-year education that would shape Gatsby's character—his discipline, his silence about his past, his understanding of the rich—began in earnest. The city appears only briefly in the narrative, but it marks the moment when Gatsby's Platonic conception of himself first took on a visible, public form.