Socioeconomic Status In The Great Gatsby
Even when your life seems to be put together, it can fall apart instantly. In the novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, he takes us through the 1920s when people's social status was separated into the East Egg (new money) and West Egg (old money). People of the time ended up doing anything when it came to keeping their wealth. Gatsby came from nothing, but when he had everything, he could not hold on to it due to greed. Money changes people. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald focuses on Gatsby and Dan Cody’s socioeconomic status to demonstrate that wealth affects a person’s thinking regardless of the manner of his upbringing, including how humble you might have started as.
To start with, we have Meyer Wolfsheim.
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When Nick says to Mr. Wolfsheim, he asks if he has anything to do with Gatsby's success in business. He responds, “I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw …show more content…
He flaunted his wealth which blatantly contradicts the characteristic of humility. Nick walks over to Gatsby's house to talk to him just like he had for the past few months. They end up talking about his car and how it looks. Gatsby is just leaning on his car, showing it off, when Nick realizes, ”He saw me looking with admiration at his car. It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport? He jumped off to give me a better view. Haven’t you ever seen it before? I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and super-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns”’ (Fitzgerald 44). Nick is looking at Gatsby sitting on the top of his car’s hood; Gatsby takes this stare as admiration. Even though Nick and, quite frankly, everyone else in the neighborhood has seen his car, Gatsby just then stands up and starts talking to him like he has never seen the car before, that it is something new and shiny to brag about. The car is not easy to miss. This demonstrates Gatsby’s desire to have everyone view him in a particular light and look up to his accomplishments rather than being content just living for himself. He needs all around him to know and see his success and that he is better than them. Gatsby started as a
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