Throughout the novel the author uses small moments to develop a character’s personality and sense of self. In the Great Gatsby there are many descriptive nuances that contribute to a character’s development. James Gatz, also known as Jay Gatsby, character was developed through the small moments he traveled through in his childhood and through the time of his passing. Jay Gatsby started off as an extravagant and ostentatious man. Everything he has done in his adult life has been with the sole purpose of fulfilling the most unrealistic of dreams of recapturing the past. Gatsby's rags-to-riches success story makes him an embodiment of the American dream. He started life with little and by the time he was a young man he had even less. There's being dissatisfied …show more content…
“James Gatz – that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career – when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior” (Chapter 4, para 6). The change of his persona was a cause of his adolescence. “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all” (Chapter 4, para 7). Thus, Gatsby’s money did not come from his inheritance but from organized crime. Gatsby has profited greatly from selling liquor illegally. This way of obtaining money was part of his grand scheme to win Daisy Buchanan. Everything he does, every purchase he makes, every party he throws, is all part of his grand scheme to bring Daisy back into his life for good. “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was…” (Chapter 6, para 132).