What Does West Egg Symbolize In The Great Gatsby

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“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. [...] Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water” (14-15). -In Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s highly regarded novel, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan gets caught between a love for her first love, Jay Gatsby, and her current husband, Tom Buchanan. Gatsby proves to her that he loves her by throwing extravagant parties in her honor. Tom, her husband who isn’t always loyal, but always comes back to her. Stuck in the middle of this power struggle: the narrator, Nick Carraway. The two societies of East Egg and West Egg differ greatly …show more content…

The main color of the homes in East Egg are white. White symbolizes an element of irresponsibility and a corruption of the morals of the people that live there. The color also represents the false purity that Daisy has. “Her voice, is full of money” (120). “Old money” means money that is handed down throughout the generations and these people have had to do little to no work to earn their money unlike the people from West Egg. ”One thing's sure and nothing's surer, the rich get richer”(101). Most of the people from East Egg want nothing to do with West Eggers. East Eggers believe that they are better than those that live in West Egg and that they are in a class of their own at the top of the social ladder. Tom Buchanan never attended a party at Jay Gatsby's Mansion until Daisy requests that they do. He is unimpressed with the party and thinks that it is childish. East Egg and West Egg aren’t just places that people live, it is much more complex than that. They are almost in a constant war. Not a physical war but a social war between the classes. East and West Egg represent an actual hard-boiled egg. White on the outside symbolizes false impurities, but yellow on the inside which actually shows all of the bad in these snobby

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