He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. 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. (Fitzgerald 98).
Nick gathers that Gatsby fabricates his background as a part of his mission to redefine himself. Further, he enunciates that indignant sentiment towards Gatsby's parents plays a significant role in Gatsby's desire to abandon the past. In fact, Gatsby's "imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all". Having achieved prodigious wealth, Gatsby lives in "the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty". Paradoxically, upon re-encountering Daisy, Gatsby begins to covet the time in the past when he and Daisy were in love. He laments that he will not be able to recreate this period and redefines his American Dream to include Daisy, a symbol of wealth and a facet of his past. Gatsby's conflicting desires to both abandon and return to the past spur his identity conflict.
Like Gatsby, the protagonist in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is one who regards the monotony of his life with nonchalance and chronically fantasizes about alternate realities, such as being a surgeon, pilot, or sailor, which results in the confusion of his identity. The short story transitions between Mitty's fantasies and Mitty's reality. In real life Mitty is often belittled by his peers and incompetent to perform the most mundane of tasks, whereas in his dreams he is a skilled and decisive young man. This particular disparity between his real day as a pedestrian man and fictitious day as an Air Force bomber highlights Mitty's conflict of identity:.
His wife would be through at the hairdresser's in fifteen minutes, Mitty saw in looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble drying it [.