St. Olaf College

St. Olaf College, a small Lutheran institution in southern Minnesota, represents the only formal higher education Jay Gatsby ever attempted—and the only one he abandoned almost as soon as he began. His two-week stay there, some months before his seventeenth birthday, marked the last conventional step he took before the life of James Gatz dissolved entirely into the invented identity of Jay Gatsby.

Location and Character

St. Olaf College was a modest, religiously affiliated school in the rural Midwest, the kind of place where a poor farm boy might work his way through by performing janitorial labor. Gatsby—then still James Gatz—arrived there driven by "an instinct toward his future glory," a vague but powerful sense that he was meant for something far beyond the shiftless farming life of his parents. The college itself, however, proved ferociously indifferent to the drums of his destiny. Its curriculum, its daily routines, and its expectations of humble service offered no purchase for the "grotesque and fantastic conceits" that haunted him at night, the "universe of ineffable gaudiness" that spun itself out in his brain while the moon soaked his tangled clothes upon the floor.

Gatsby's Brief Enrollment and Departure

Gatsby stayed at St. Olaf for exactly two weeks. He was dismayed not by the academic difficulty but by the college's utter lack of recognition for what he felt was his own extraordinary fate. The janitor's work required to pay his way—scrubbing floors, emptying waste—struck him as a degradation, a daily denial of the magnificent future he already saw as his birthright. He despised it. When he drifted back to Lake Superior, he was still searching for something to do, but he had decisively rejected the path of patient, incremental self-improvement that St. Olaf represented. The college could not contain him; it could not even slow him down.

Contrast with Gatsby's Self-Education

The rejection of St. Olaf is thrown into sharp relief by the document Gatsby carried with him for years afterward: a ragged copy of Hopalong Cassidy in which, as a boy of sixteen, he had written a detailed schedule and a set of general resolves. That schedule—rising at 6:00 A.M., dumbbell exercise, study of electricity, practice of elocution and poise, reading one improving book or magazine per week, saving three dollars weekly, being better to parents—was the curriculum of a self-made man, a private academy of the will. St. Olaf offered the same virtues through institutional discipline, but Gatsby could not submit to an institution that treated him as a janitor rather than as a prodigy. He would take the schedule's principles—self-denial, constant improvement, the pursuit of a grand design—and apply them outside any college walls, on the decks of Dan Cody's yacht and in the service of his own Platonic conception of himself.

Narrative Significance

St. Olaf College functions in the novel as the road not taken—the one brief, failed experiment in conventional advancement that Gatsby tried and instantly rejected. It marks the point at which James Gatz decided that the ordinary machinery of American success (education, hard work, patient accumulation) was too slow and too small for what he intended. The college's "ferocious indifference" to his destiny confirmed for him that he would have to invent his own destiny, on his own terms, and that no existing institution would ever recognize his greatness before he forced it to. In this sense, St. Olaf is the negative image of Gatsby's later mansion: one is a place he could not bear to stay in, the other a place he built to prove he had left it behind forever.