Why Is Jay Gatsby Great

Jay Gatsby can be considered “great” based on several aspects. First off, to get a real sense of his achievements, you have to know about his past. He was born James Gatz to an extremely poor farming family in North Dakota, and always hated his poverty. He ended up going to St. Olaf College in Minnesota, which he promptly dropped out of, because he was "dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny.” He then went to Lake Superior, where he met and befriended a copper tycoon named Dan Cody. Cody became Gatz’s mentor and invited him on his ten year yacht trek. James spent that time learning the ways of the rich, and at 17 years old he changed his name to Jay Gatsby, thinking that Gatz was too foreign sounding and wouldn’t
He became Jay Gatsby, all of his dreams turned into work, and the the work turned into money. Even though as a boy he had been a hard worker- as shown when his father shows Jay’s old daily schedule to Nick- he was only setting up the framework for a successful life, and it took his transformation into Jay Gatsby and his love affair with Daisy to start him on the right track. He was an embodiment of the “New Money”, young, determined, vulgar, hardworking, and not very tasteful. He had far more heart than the “Old Money” like Jordan and the Buchanans, who were tasteful and elegant, but also had the lazy boredom of of someone who has everything they want. Even though Gatsby made his money through criminal activity, he was loyal, sincere, and his love for Daisy was genuine- even though Daisy herself is disloyal and doesn’t seem to care much about Gatsby’s death. In the end, Gatsby is shown as the victim- not just the victim of murder, but also of love for Daisy- because he went through so much, and ended up dying, for a girl who left him years earlier and now is obsessed with money and luxury. He fell in love with his idea of perfection; a girl with charm, wealth, sophistication, and grace- all the things he wanted as a child- but as Gatsby changed, so did Daisy. She ends up falling far short of Gatsby’s expectations; Nick describes her as shallow and fickle, and that “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy— they
Gatsby was born too poor for Daisy, who wanted to live in luxury all her life, so at first, he lied to her about his own background. But after Daisy went off to marry Tom, Gatsby knew he needed to actually get rich and then, like a magician, create the illusion that he was the sophisticated, tasteful, elegant patrician that Tom was, and that Daisy would fall in love with. So he reinvented himself, and spent years learning the ways of the wealthy. Through bootlegging alcohol, he got rich enough to create his illusion, and then tried as best as he could to hide his past. Nick says about Gatsby “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So 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.” Gatsby is still James Gatz on the inside, but on the outside, he’s a completely different man. “His greatness is shown by several aspects, from his reinvention of himself, to his love for daisy, to his sheer determination. Gatsby's love for Daisy is what drives him to reinvent himself, rather than greed or true ambition. This unsullied,