Chapter 6

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Reading Task: Chapter VI  

Summary of the Content  
Nick interrupts the narrative to give Gatsby’s real biography. James Gatz of North Dakota invented “Jay Gatsby” at seventeen, turning his back on shiftless farming parents and the limits of poverty. A chance meeting with the copper magnate Dan Cody on Lake Superior gives the boy a glimpse of the glittering world he covets, but Cody’s mistress Ella Kaye cheats Gatsby of the $25,000 legacy that might have bought him entry. The rest of the chapter returns to the present summer: Tom Buchanan, suspicious of Daisy’s afternoon drives, insists on accompanying her to Gatsby’s next party. The night is stiff and awkward; Daisy, half-charmed, half-appalled, calls the spectacle “unsophisticated,” while Tom sneers that Gatsby must be a bootlegger. Gatsby, believing he can now reclaim the past, asks Nick to arrange a private reunion at Nick’s cottage.

Evaluation  
Fitzgerald’s shift from lyrical present to mythic past compresses a Horatio-Alger story into six pages without ever sounding like exposition. The prose modulates from hard, reportorial facts (“his parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people”) to incantatory, almost biblical cadences (“he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent”). The contrast between Gatsby’s radiant self-creation and the sordid details of Cody’s yacht undercuts the romance even as it inflates it, letting the reader feel both the grandeur and the pathosis of the American Dream. Structurally, the chapter is a hinge: it explains the source of Gatsby’s wealth and his obsession, then slams that explanation against the social brick wall of East Egg, showing that no amount of reinvention can purchase the one asset—birth—that Tom owns by accident.

Reflection  
Gatsby’s deliberate self-fashioning feels eerily modern in an age of curated Instagram bios and personal-brand gurus. Yet the chapter reminds me that reinvention is only half the equation; the gatekeepers still decide which stories they will let inside. Reading it after a week of job-search networking emails, I see my own careful tweaks of résumé language—every bullet point another “Jay Gatsby” costume. The sting comes when Daisy, whose voice is “full of money,” dismisses the party: all the filtered photos in the world cannot fabricate the casual entitlement that old money wears like a second skin. It makes me question what parts of myself I am willing to mortgage for admission, and whether the green light I chase is a dream or just a neon sign someone else installed.