Gatsby's Schedule and Resolves

Gatsby's Schedule and Resolves is a handwritten list of daily habits and personal resolutions that the young James Gatz wrote in the back of his copy of Hopalong Cassidy on September 12, 1906, at age seventeen. The schedule reveals the rigorous self-discipline and ambition with which he attempted to transform himself from a poor farm boy into the idealized figure he called Jay Gatsby, and it stands as a poignant artifact of the gap between his disciplined aspirations and the tragic outcome of his life.

The Document and Its Contents

The schedule is printed on the last fly-leaf of a ragged old copy of Hopalong Cassidy, a book James Gatz owned as a boy. It is headed by the word "SCHEDULE" and the date September 12, 1906. The daily routine begins with rising from bed at 6:00 A.M., followed by dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling from 6:15 to 6:30. From 7:15 to 8:15 he scheduled study of electricity and other subjects. Work occupied the long block from 8:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. Baseball and sports filled the next half hour, and from 5:00 to 6:00 he practiced elocution, poise, and how to attain it. The evening hours from 7:00 to 9:00 were reserved for studying needed inventions. Below the schedule, a set of "GENERAL RESOLVES" forbids wasting time at Shafters or another establishment, prohibits smoking or chewing, mandates a bath every other day, requires reading one improving book or magazine per week, and sets a savings goal of $5.00 per week, later crossed out and reduced to $3.00. The final resolve is to be better to parents.

Origins in James Gatz's Youth

James Gatz was born to shiftless and unsuccessful farm people in North Dakota, and his imagination never really accepted them as his parents. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself—he was a son of God, he believed, and must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. The schedule and resolves represent the concrete, almost mechanical means by which the seventeen-year-old boy attempted to invent the sort of Jay Gatsby he wanted to become. His father, Henry C. Gatz, who discovered the book by accident after Gatsby's death, presented it to Nick Carraway as proof of his son's character, reading each item aloud and looking eagerly for admiration. He explained that Jimmy was bound to get ahead and always had resolves like this, and that he once beat his son for telling him he ate like a hog.

The Schedule as a Window into Gatsby's Character

The schedule reveals a young man who believed that systematic self-improvement could overcome the accidents of birth. The specific activities—dumbbell exercise, wall-scaling, study of electricity, practice of elocution and poise, study of needed inventions—reflect a practical, almost utilitarian vision of success, one that combines physical discipline, technical knowledge, and social polish. The resolves against smoking, chewing, and wasting time echo the Protestant work ethic, while the savings goal and the command to be better to parents suggest a moral framework. Yet the schedule also contains a note of the fantastic: the study of "needed inventions" and the practice of "poise and how to attain it" point toward the same extravagant ambition that later led Gatsby to imagine himself as a son of God. The document is both a practical plan and a piece of the same dreaming that produced the green light, the mansion, and the five-year vigil.

The Schedule's Fate and Thematic Significance

The schedule was never enough. Gatsby's father, showing the book to Nick Carraway, seemed to expect that the list would be copied down for Nick's own use, as if the discipline itself guaranteed success. But the young man who followed that schedule became the man who, at the end, floated dead in his swimming pool, the victim of a dream that had outrun its foundations. The schedule represents the self-made man's faith in will and method, but Gatsby's actual career—his apprenticeship to the bootlegger Meyer Wolfsheim, his involvement in the fixing of the 1919 World Series, his accumulation of a fortune through illegal means—followed a path the schedule could not have predicted. The document survives as a relic of the boy who believed he could climb the ladder of the sidewalks to a secret place above the trees, and it underscores the novel's central irony: that the most disciplined self-improvement can serve the most extravagant and ultimately destructive of dreams.