Gatsby rows out to Dan Cody's yacht

Gatsby rows out to Dan Cody's yacht is the decisive origin point of Jay Gatsby, the moment when James Gatz of North Dakota, a seventeen-year-old in a torn green jersey and canvas pants, invented himself and set his life on a course that would end in tragedy. It was the specific instant that witnessed the beginning of his career, when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. James Gatz had been loafing along the beach that afternoon, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour. This act of confident, opportunistic intervention was the first public performance of the persona he had long been preparing.

Identity and Background

James Gatz was the son of shiftless and unsuccessful farm people, and his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed. His heart was in a constant, turbulent riot, haunted by grotesque and fantastic conceits. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene. An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota, but he stayed there only two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, and despising the janitor's work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody's yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore.

The Encounter with Dan Cody

Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money. To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. He smiled at Cody—he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled. Cody asked him a few questions, one of which elicited the brand new name, and found that he was quick and extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pair of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap. When the Tuolomee left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast, Gatsby left too.

Consequences and Aftermath

Gatsby was employed in a vague personal capacity—while he remained with Cody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about, and he provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five years, during which the boat went three times around the Continent. It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died. It was indirectly due to Cody that Gatsby drank so little, forming the habit of letting liquor alone. And it was from Cody that he inherited money—a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn't get it. He never understood the legal device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man. The photograph of Dan Cody, a gray, florid man with a hard, empty face, hung in Gatsby's bedroom as a token of forgotten violence. Gatsby's schedule and resolves from his boyhood, found in a ragged old copy of Hopalong Cassidy, show the self-discipline that preceded this transformation: a schedule of rising at 6:00 A.M., dumbbell exercise, study of electricity, work, baseball, practice of elocution, and study of needed inventions, along with general resolves to save $3.00 per week and be better to parents. This encounter with Cody was the catalyst that turned those resolves into a career, and the man who would spend his life trying to repeat the past had his first, irreversible beginning on that rowboat on Lake Superior.