Social Hierarchy In The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby explores the issues of society and the hierarchy of social class. The three homes belonging to Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway, are all in the vicinity of each other, which illustrates the close proximity of their three lives, and foreshadows how they end up intertwining. Myrtle and George Wilson’s home is between the Buchanan’s and Gatsby’s, in the Valley of Ashes, and eventually comes to represent the failure of the American Dream. The homes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby represent the different characteristics of their dwellers. Gatsby is a man with a one track mind, while Nick is simple and sensible. The Buchanan 's are unashamedly opulent, while the Wilson 's are poor

Who builds his own wealth and therefore builds his superiority. With a lack of family wealth and self-earned fortune, he represents the opposite from Tom and Daisy Buchanan. While the Buchanans seem to live without goals or ambition, Gatsby has a one track mind – to become wealthy to win back Daisy. Fitzgerald shows Gatsby’s ambitions with the schedule of his daily activities written in his childhood novel (Fitzgerald 164). Gatsby’s father say to Nick “It just shows you…[He] was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this” (Fitzgerald 164). This quote is what separates the East eggers (old money) from the West eggers (new money). Gatsby has earned his social superiority through his drive and ambition. The house symbolizes Gatsby 's upbringing from a poor farm boy to a rich, wealthy New Yorker. His flashy and superficial personality comes from the importance he puts on material items. “[an] imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side,…a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden” (Fitzgerald 11), all suggest Gatsby 's desire to be perceived as

Like his house, Nick is not showy, this characteristic allows people to easily trust him, which supports his role as the narrator of the story. Despite the fact that everything revolves around him, Nick is never actually involved in the events of the story, he simply acts as a vehicle for the other character’s wants and needs. Nick describes his house as "an eyesore” (Fitzgerald 11) compared to the mansions around it and say that “it had been overlooked" (Fitzgerald 11) in the presence of such glamorous homes. Similar to Nick himself, his house is strangely out of place among the mansions that are beside it, but is small enough that people overlook how much it does not fit in. Fitzgerald uses Nick 's house in order to show how Nick fits in, in Gatsby’s world, similar to his home, he is overlooked in the presence of such wealthy people. Nick 's House serves as a meeting place where Gatsby and Daisy meet up. Parallel to how Nick serves as an object that allows Daisy and Gatsby to reunite. Nick is unfamiliar with the world of the extravagantly wealthy, though he begins to adapt throughout the novel, he is generally out of place in the world of the rich, and blends in to the