"If he'd of lived, he'd of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He'd of helped build up the country."
Chapter 9 · Henry Gatz
Context
Mr. Gatz, Gatsby's father, expresses his belief in his son's unrealized potential, comparing him to the railroad magnate James J. Hill—a famous self-made man who built the Great Northern Railway. He speaks with the ungrammatical dialect that reveals the humble origins Gatsby spent his life concealing.
Analysis
The dramatic irony is devastating: Mr. Gatz's comparison to James J. Hill invokes the mythology of legitimate American enterprise-building, while the reader knows that Gatsby's actual wealth came from bootlegging and bond fraud—his 'building up the country' was in fact its corruption. The dialect ('he'd of') performs the class distance between father and son, revealing the very origins that Gatsby erased from his identity, while simultaneously demonstrating that Gatsby's dream of transcendence was inherited from this humble man who genuinely believed the American myth of self-making.
How to Use in Essay
Ideal for essays on the gap between the American Dream's mythology and its reality in Gatsby's case, or for analyzing how Mr. Gatz functions as evidence that Gatsby's idealism—however corrupted in practice—had genuine, innocent origins in a working-class faith in American possibility.