In F.Scot Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the main character, Jay Gatsby, reincarnates himself and actually kills off his former selves to become the new and “great” Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s purpose was to point out the many masks and versions of ourselves, and who we might have destroyed to become the person we are today. Albeit, we have probably not destroyed our former selves to the extent that Gatsby does. In affect, the people we really truly are all the time, are there because of someone we once were had to be left aside, or killed if you will..
Gatsby is born James Gatz, a Midwest kid from North Dakota. He began creating the new and improved James Gatz at a young age where we duplicated Ben Franklin’s rules to live by. The same rules where we get the age old adage: early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealth and wise. However, improvement is not destruction. James Gatz is still his own self till he meets Dan Cody.
James Gatz is is digging clams on Lake Superior on “little girl bay” (100) James Gatz gets into a row boat, and enter the “little girl – a symbol of a mother, but not just any mother the mother earth that belongs to the “great” lakes. He rows over to the boat and when he is asked his name – the head peeps out of the birth canal and responds Jay Gatsby, and Dan Cody pulls him out to be reborn as the mythical great water born Jay Gatsby. James Gatz died on that little row boat. The mythical, well oiled, creation of a boys mind, now walked into full reality.
James Gatsby met Daisy, but he did not have the money she wanted. He fell upon Wolfsheim, made the money, and with the help of Nick , he will meet Daisy as the fully realized illusion that James Gatz had “imagined and created before going to bed each night”(102). Before he can achieve the level that Daisy wants, he must destroy the fighting-to-get-her Gatsby, the determined man who will do anything till this moment happens, and recreate himself to be the Gatsby who will now be part of her life as an equal.
Gatsby exits Nick’s house through the back door as soon as Daisy arrives. Figuratively, the back door exit is the symbol of death and ending; leaving this world to a worse or dead world. He’s then plunged into the life giving rain, and the womb from which he will emerge. He arrives at the front door, the entrance into a new life or world, dripping wet and standing in a puddle with the same description of a woman’s water breaking. He walks through the long dark hallway and into the light and “life”, which is symbolized by the greenhouse of flowers that are in Nick’s living room. Jay Gatsby, Daisy’s lover and love has arrived into the world.
Is Gatsby truly killing of a side of himself? There is a psychologist theory that states that no matter what, there’s always a small piece of the essential you in all people you are. This is true for normal people, but not Jay Gatsby who repeatedly becomes more and more mythical to point of being Great or Godlike, which he saw himself as anyway. He has become the perfect man that every woman would want. Gatsby is an exact duplicate of the modern James Bond figure. Therefore, it would be almost impossible to reach this level, for he is as mythical as the story that has created him. Yet, are we truly who we are all the time? What level is acceptable?
