“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 5): At seventeen, James Gatz’s alternate personality, Jay Gatsby, previously behind the scenes, takes over.

“James Gatz of North Dakota…was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen…I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents…unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all…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” (1, p. 98).

Multiple personality starts in childhood, and as the narrator says, “Gatsby” had probably first arisen in Gatz’s imagination long before age seventeen, as an alternate identity who was not the child of unsuccessful parents. But it was not until age seventeen that Jay Gatsby, James Gatz’s alternate personality, took over.

A psychological explanation is most likely, because the name change has no socioeconomic advantage. If his family name had been Rocke, and he had changed it to Rockefeller, then that might have been a rational scheme. But the change from Gatz to Gatsby is socially meaningless. Any person from a rich family knows that there is no rich family by that name, and infers that Gatsby’s sudden riches must be based on criminal activity such as bootlegging.

Is there any other psychological explanation? Why not just say that James Gatz wanted a fresh start? But the American dream is rags to riches, or in the political arena, from the log cabin to the White House. A man is proud to be the first successful one in his family.

So why does F. Scott Fitzgerald include the Gatz to Gatsby name change? Does he want to raise the issue of multiple personality? If he doesn’t, then it is an example of what I call “gratuitous multiple personality”: the only reason it is in the novel is that it reflect’s the author’s own psychology.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York, Scribner, 2004.