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The “things” they “smash up” in the course of the novel include Gatsby’s heart, Gatsby’s car, Gatsby’s life, Nick’s innocence, and Myrtle Wilson. Nick is disturbed by this behavior, and this quote illustrates his frustration at how much trouble Tom and Daisy cause.
- The Great Gatsby
Nick is unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he was...
- The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published in 1925 during the Roaring Twenties, a period of economic prosperity and social change in the United States. Set in the summer of 1922, the novel unfolds in the fictional town of West Egg on Long Island and follows the life of Nick Carraway.
Nick is unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he was educated at Yale and has social connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper class. Nick drives out to East Egg one evening for dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, an erstwhile classmate of Nick’s at Yale.
The Hollowness of the Upper Class. One of the major topics explored in The Great Gatsby is the sociology of wealth, specifically, how the newly minted millionaires of the 1920s differ from and relate to the old aristocracy of the country’s richest families. In the novel, West Egg and its denizens represent the newly rich, while East Egg and ...
The Great Gatsby portrays three different social classes: "old money" (Tom and Daisy Buchanan); "new money" (Gatsby); and a class that might be called "no money" (George and Myrtle Wilson). "Old money" families have fortunes dating from the 19th century or before, have built up powerful and influential social connections, and tend to hide their ...
The first instances we encounter the theme of social class are in descriptions of the distinct communities: West Egg and East Egg. West Egg stands for newly rich individuals who have earned their wealth, while East Egg represents those from old money.
The three social classes represented in the novel are the very wealthy (symbolized by Daisy and Tom Buchanan); the upper middle class or middle class who socialize with the wealthy but who must...
