Gatsby tells Nick his background story

During a late July morning in 1922, Gatsby's cream-colored car, bright with nickel and swollen with hat-boxes and supper-boxes, lurched up Nick Carraway's rocky drive. It was the first time Gatsby had called on him, though Nick had already attended two of his parties, ridden in his hydroplane, and used his beach. Gatsby proposed they ride to New York together for lunch. As they drove, Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-colored suit, before breaking out with a surprising question: "What's your opinion of me, anyhow?" Overwhelmed, Nick began generalized evasions, but Gatsby interrupted, insisting he wanted to tell Nick something about his life to prevent him from getting a wrong idea from all the stories he heard. He was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavored conversation in his halls.

The Fabricated Biography

Gatsby declared he would tell "God's truth," his right hand suddenly ordering divine retribution to stand by. He claimed to be the son of wealthy people in the Middle West, all dead now, brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all his ancestors had been educated there for many years—a family tradition. He hurried the phrase "educated at Oxford," swallowing or choking on it as though it had bothered him before. Nick knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. With this doubt, Gatsby's whole statement fell to pieces, and Nick wondered if there wasn't something sinister about him after all. When Nick casually inquired what part of the Middle West, Gatsby answered "San Francisco." He said his family all died and he came into a good deal of money, his voice solemn as if the memory of that sudden extinction still haunted him. After that, he claimed to have lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe—Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to him long ago. Nick managed to restrain his incredulous laughter, recognizing the phrases as worn so threadbare they evoked no image except that of a turbaned character leaking sawdust.

The War Record and Tangible Proof

Gatsby then turned to the war, calling it a great relief and claiming he tried very hard to die but seemed to bear an enchanted life. He said he accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began, and in the Argonne Forest he took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half-mile gap on either side where the infantry couldn't advance. They stayed two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. He claimed he was promoted to major, and every Allied government gave him a decoration—even Montenegro. He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into Nick's palm. To Nick's astonishment, the thing had an authentic look: "Orderi di Danilo," ran the circular legend, "Montenegro, Nicolas Rex." Turning it, Nick read "Major Jay Gatsby, For Valour Extraordinary." Gatsby then produced a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an archway through which were visible a host of spires—Trinity Quad, Oxford—with Gatsby himself, looking a little younger, holding a cricket bat. For a moment, Nick believed it all was true, seeing the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal and him opening a chest of rubies.

The Request and Its Context

Gatsby pocketed his souvenirs with satisfaction and said he was going to make a big request of Nick that day, so he thought Nick ought to know something about him. He didn't want Nick to think he was just some nobody, explaining that he usually found himself among strangers because he drifted here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to him. He hesitated and said Nick would hear about it that afternoon. When Nick asked if he meant at lunch, Gatsby said no, that afternoon, because he happened to find out that Nick was taking Miss Baker to tea. Nick asked if Gatsby was in love with Miss Baker, but Gatsby said no, that Miss Baker had kindly consented to speak to Nick about "this matter." Nick hadn't the faintest idea what "this matter" was, and was more annoyed than interested, sure the request would be something utterly fantastic. Gatsby wouldn't say another word, his correctness growing as they neared the city. They passed Port Roosevelt, the valley of ashes where Nick glimpsed Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump, and when a policeman stopped them for speeding, Gatsby waved a white card before the man's eyes and was immediately let go, explaining he had done the commissioner a favor once.

The Contrast with Gatsby's True Origins

Much later, Nick learned the truth that contradicted this entire performance. Gatsby's real name was James Gatz, and he had changed it at seventeen when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor on Lake Superior. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people, and his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself—a son of God who must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. He had 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. The story Gatsby told Nick in the car was a carefully constructed fiction, a performance designed to create a past worthy of his dream. The real Gatsby had been a clam-digger and salmon-fisher on Lake Superior, had attended St. Olaf College for two weeks before despising the janitor's work, and had inherited nothing from Cody—a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars that he never received, the millions going instead to Ella Kaye. What remained was his singularly appropriate education, the vague contour of Jay Gatsby filled out to the substantiality of a man. The fabricated biography, with its Oxford education and inherited wealth, was the front-stage persona Gatsby maintained, while the back-stage reality of a self-made, self-invented dreamer remained hidden, revealed only in the vulnerable hours after his confrontation with Tom Buchanan had shattered his illusion.