James Gatz changes his name to Jay Gatsby

James Gatz changes his name to Jay Gatsby at the age of seventeen, a decisive act of self-invention that marks the beginning of his career and his lifelong commitment to a Platonic ideal of himself. This renaming, occurring at the specific moment he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor on Lake Superior, was not a casual whim but the formal birth of a persona to which he remained faithful to the end. The transformation from the son of shiftless and unsuccessful farm people into the figure of Jay Gatsby represented a complete rejection of his origins and an embrace of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty he conceived as his true inheritance.

Identity and Background

James Gatz was born to "shiftless and unsuccessful farm people" in North Dakota, parents his imagination never really accepted. His legal name was James Gatz, but he had likely had the name "Jay Gatsby" ready for a long time before he formally adopted it. The truth, as Nick Carraway later understood it, was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself." He was, in his own mind, "a son of God" who must be about His Father's business. At seventeen, 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 before the name change, he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and salmon-fisher, his brown, hardening body living naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of the bracing days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, but his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot, haunted by grotesque and fantastic conceits at night.

The Moment of Transformation

The specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career occurred when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the yacht TUOLOMEE, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour. Cody, a product of the Nevada silver fields and the Yukon, 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, Cody 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 Significance

This act of renaming set the pattern for Gatsby's entire life. He was employed by Cody in a vague personal capacity, serving as steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about. The arrangement lasted five years, during which the boat went three times around the continent. It might have lasted indefinitely except that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died. Gatsby inherited a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars but never received it; what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate education, and the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man. The name change was the first and most fundamental of Gatsby's many fabrications, the foundation upon which he built his entire identity as a wealthy, Oxford-educated man of the world. It was a deliberate break with his past, a refusal to accept the limitations of his birth, and a commitment to a dream that would ultimately prove both magnificent and destructive. The schedule and resolves he wrote in a copy of Hopalong Cassidy as a boy—including "Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it" and "Be better to parents"—showed that even before the name change, he was bound to get ahead, always having some resolves like this or something. His father, Henry C. Gatz, later brought this book to Nick Carraway after Gatsby's death, saying "It just shows you."