Personalities In The Great Gatsby

Personalities in The Great Gatsby The beginning of The Great Gatsby introduces readers to two places that will be important settings throughout the rest of the novel: The West Egg and the East Egg. These two places are described as being distinctly different, and this contrast between two places is continued when comparing the Valley of Ashes and New York. Based on the use of color and basic physical description, the West Egg and the Valley of Ashes are typically made out to be the lesser in comparison to the East Egg and New York. At first, the distinction between these places can be seen as simply a matter of money: who has the most and who is new verses old money, but there is also a matter of personality that seems to divide these places.

Gatsby’s life story is continuously questioned by Nick because of slight tendencies that Gatsby shows. Despite his wealth, Gatsby acts differently than his wealthy counterparts. During the first party that Nick attends, the other attendees start out acting very civil, but they slowly become partiers later in the text. They drink heavily and all the wives begin to fight with their husbands. While they interact very socially with each other, not everyone is quite sure who Gatsby is. For part of the night, Gatsby is described as watching all the events. Nick states, “I could see nothing sinister about him. I wonder if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased” (Fitzgerald 50). From this quote, the fact that Gatsby acting different is assigned to the fact that he has not been drinking, but even earlier during the party when Nick meets Gatsby, he describes him as “an elaborate elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care” (Fitzgerald 48). Nick later admits that “I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New