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“He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. …It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself…” (53).

Gatsby skillfully forms a persona for himself as the vision of the successful American Dream aspirant. Jay Gatz, as he was called then, starts out as a poor boy struggling to make ends meet in the Midwest. Even at an early age he strives for a lifestyle better than the one he unfortunately goes about living, taking his idea so far as to even outline his goals for self-improvement in a journal (181). He begrudgingly takes a job as a janitor in order to pay for his tuition, which stems as a source of profound humiliation for him. He looks at his position as quite possibly one of the lowest in existence, and not one in which he wants to spend the rest of his life slaving away in. Entering his later teen years, Gatz links himself on as the personal assistant to a wealthy man by the name of Dan Cody, a man whom Jay quickly takes great admiration in and so strives to emulate. At this point he ceases to be Jay Gatz and takes on the persona of Gatsby, in an effort to abandon his lower-class roots for good and start anew. His new character shows up even in his features, especially in his charismatic smile which “faced…the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you” (53). Throughout his efforts to better himself and achieve success, he looks with favor on the world and the potential it holds, in acknowledgement of the fact that it offers him a plethora of opportunities in which to see his wishes fulfilled. The life of Gatsby thus follows the basic plot of Horatio Alger’s stories, with a man who strives tirelessly to make a name for himself and succeeds.

Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby

image courtesy of http://www.forbes.com