The great gatsby. i HAVE NO IDEA WHY HE CHANGED HIS NAME. HELP PLZ?

Question

Why does James Gatz change his name to Jay Gatsby?

Answer 1

Because "James Gatz" was a common name....it reflected his common background. Jay Gatsby wanted a new identity for himself, one that was rich and successful. He was a complete phony, down to his name.

Answer 2

The title character is obviously a very status-conscious individual, who has made it his life's ambition to remake himself so he can pass for a wealthy aristocrat. The last name "Gatz" has an ethnic sound to it that he wanted to hide by using a more blue-blood-sounding name like "Gatsby."

Answer 3

He changed it to "put on" a new identity and to distance himself from his heritage. There's an undercurrent of anti-semitism involved.
More specifically, James Gatz is a Jewish name, which Gatsby changed in his late teens showing his own shame for his ethnicity.
Notice also that the shifty Jewish criminal in the book, Mr. Wolfsheim, has a poor command of the English language. Nick, the narrator mocks his versions of "Oggsford" for Oxford and "goneggtion" for connection.
Wolfsheim, the novel's symbolic representative of the "criminal element," is obviously Jewish: Fitzgerald gives the character a number of stereotypical physical features (a large nose, a diminutive stature) that were a staple of racist caricature in the 1920s. During this period, anti-Semitism in America was at an all-time high: Jews, as a result of their "characteristic greed," were held responsible for the corruption of the nation as a whole. Fitzgerald seems to uncritically draw on this racist ideology in his presentation of Wolfsheim; the character is nothing more than a grotesque stereotype.
"In a biographical search, "Gatz" appears to be both a Jewish and a Gentile name. As noted, "Gatz" also appears as a germanicized form of the Yiddish "Gets." Thus the reader of Gatsby is faced with the possibility that Henry Gatz, father of Jay Gatsby, may already be "passing" as Gentile and is thus much more of a significant prototype for his son's own self-transformation than has previously been acknowledged.

8 The layered complexity of Gatsby's name is consistent with other names in the text that emphasize masquerade and pretense: for example, Mrs. Chrystie, who accompanies Hubert Auerbach to Gatsby's party, "whose name, more than likely, suggests the famous Christie Minstrels of the early nineteenth century. Mrs. Chrystie masquerades as a wife, and while she wears the name of her husband, she pretends to be someone she is not" (Grim and Houston 1989, 83). There is also "the prince of something whom we called Duke" at Gatsby's party (Fitzgerald 1999, 51), as well as the novel Simon Called Peter that Myrtle Wilson keeps in her apartment (25). Most telling, for our purposes, is the name "Meyer Wolfshiem," whose odd spelling has rarely been noticed by readers (see Michaels [1995], above), but which represents a marked variant from the German "Wolfsheim." One could argue-as does Edmund Wilson when he "corrects" the text for his 1941 edition (see Bruccoli's "Introduction," Fitzgerald 1995, liv)-that Fitzgerald, a notoriously careless speller, was simply in error in his spelling of "Wolfshiem." However, one could also see this spelling as deliberately emphasizing the same ethnic uncertainty as the name "James Gatz." "Wolfshiem" is a name that sounds and looks "foreign" (and, in this context, "Jewish"), but it does not conform to a Germanic (or German-Jewish) origin. It is a name that troubles, that confuses; a name that masks rather than reveals identity.
Fitzgerald's youthful correspondence is filled with similar sentiments. In an undated letter to Thomas Boyd, he writes, "All these 'marvellous' places like Majorca turn out to have some one enormous disadvantage-bugs, lepers, Jews, consumptives, or philistines" (F. Scott Fitzgerald Archive, Special Collections, Princeton University Library)."

Answer 4

I think he was distancing himself from his past...reinventing himself if you prefer. The new name also made it impossible for the curious to find out more about him, giving rise to much speculation as to just who he was and how he made his fortune.

Answer 5

penis