For instance, Nick’s small house sits next to an “eyesore” of a mansion owned by Gatsby, a man Nick knows only by name. The West Egg “new rich” are characterized by garish displays of wealth that the old money families find distasteful. That “old money” Nick rents a house in “new money” West Egg shows he spans both worlds. “Old money” East Egg faces “new money” West Egg across the water, symbolically showing the class rivalry: the towns literally oppose each other. Theme – Class (Old Money, New Money, No Money) – West Egg is where the “new rich” live, people who have made their fortunes only recently and have neither the social connections nor the cultural refinement to be accepted among the “old money” families of East Egg. Nick observes that the two communities differed greatly in every way but shape and size. So why does he get to be mean-dad to everyone?Įast Egg vs West EggNick rents a house in West Egg, a Long Island suburb located directly across a bay from East Egg. He’s literally done nothing to deserve it.
Three symbols in the great gatsby that show theme how to#
Wealth makes Tom “paternal,” as though it gives him the right to tell the entire world how to behave. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked-and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. Nick may be able to make it in the Middle-West, but he’s not cut out for East Coast life. Nick sees two kinds of America: the hard-working Chicago, part of a “Middle-West” culture and the “white,” fashionable East Egg. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. I lived at West Egg, the-well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. Nick self-deprecatingly punctures the illusion that his family comes from nobility-but instead, he makes himself into another kind of nobility: a family that actually has achieved the American Dream of wealth and respectability through hard work. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day. He’s joking, but this is the same logic that makes people buy designer sunglasses: you may not be able to afford the actual clothes, but you still get to have a little reflected glamour. It may be a small house, but at least Nick gets to live near millionaires. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard … My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires-all for eighty dollars a month. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.
I lived at West Egg, the – well, the least fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. Except, we think this might be a little like the, “but I have a lot of _ friends” excuse to make someone not sound racist or xenophobic.) Maybe he has the “natural decencies” that other members of high society don’t. Gatsby may be low-class, but Nick still manages to see something good in him, anyway. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Some people are naturally just nicer and more honest: they have more “sense of the fundamental decencies.” But does Nick believe that poor people can be born with these fundamental decencies, too, or do you have to be rich to have natural class? Here, Nick says that money isn’t the only thing that some people are born to.
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
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