Wealth In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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The Great Gatsby is a book that recounts Nick Carraway's relationships with his sister Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, Tom's relationships with George and Myrtle Wilson, his affairs with Gatsby, and the wealth gap between them from the perspective of Nick. An inequality in total wealth between races, levels of power, and places of residence is known as a wealth gap. The Buchanans, the Wilsons, James Gatsby, and Jordan Baker in Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby serve as conduits for the expression of this issue. The Wilsons are barely making it by, while the Buchanans are incredibly wealthy. The fact that Daisy and Tom reside in the affluent East Egg neighborhood while the Wilsons reside in the less prosperous Valley of Ashes area helps to illustrate why the wealthy can purchase many expensive items while the less fortunate cannot. For instance, Nick explains that the homes on East Egg are White Palaces, “Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg …show more content…

This makes people like Gatsby appear untrustworthy, yet he must do it to become wealthy, believing that unless he is wealthy like Tom, Daisy would not accept him. For instance, in chapter 1, Nick explains Tom's fortune as “His family was enormously wealthy – even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach…” (Fitzgerald 6), while Tom describes how Gatsby got his riches “I found out what your ‘drug-stores’ were…He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far from wrong.” (Fitzgerald 133). This illustrates how, in contrast to Tom, who is wealthy by birth, Gatsby's method of acquiring riches is similar to that of some poorer

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