From James Gatz to Jay Gatsby: Proto-Posthuman Identity and Capitalist Self-Engineering in The Great Gatsby

Abstract

This study explores the transformation of James Gatz into Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) as an early example of constructed identity. Rather than treating Gatsby’s reinvention only as a pursuit of the American Dream, the article argues that his self-creation reflects a form of capitalist self-engineering. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, Gatsby is interpreted as an “analog cyborg,” a figure shaped not by digital technology but by disciplined habits, consumption, and social performance. By reshaping his behavior, speech, appearance, and invented background, he approaches identity as something that can be designed and improved rather than something naturally given. The interpretation is further supported by cultural theories of discipline, performance, and consumption, which explain how modern society forms identity through routine conduct, public display, and social recognition. Using qualitative close textual analysis informed by a New Historicist perspective, the study examines Gatsby’s “General Resolves,” regulated routines, and carefully staged public image. These practices reveal a pattern of efficiency and self-regulation similar to modern ideas of self-optimization. Wealth, material objects, and spectacle function as social mechanisms that temporarily allow Gatsby to appear to cross class boundaries and gain legitimacy. His persona therefore emerges as a hybrid formation produced through the interaction of personal effort and the economic and cultural structures of modern society. The article argues that Fitzgerald’s novel anticipates later concerns about unstable identity and constructed subjectivity. Gatsby’s downfall demonstrates the limits of self-creation. Although identity can be performed and reshaped, it cannot fully erase social history or inherited hierarchy. The novel therefore offers a pre-digital exploration of technologically organized subjectivity and suggests that the desire to improve and redesign the self originates within capitalist modernity rather than contemporary biotechnology.