The Upper Class In The Great Gatsby

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In the book The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald, the author, explores the lives of the upper class through the narrator Nick, who is not quite inside the upper class, but isn’t lower class either, and so is in the perfect position to tell the story from an impartial standpoint. Tom and Daisy represent the upper class, and Gatsby represents the lower class that has risen to wealth, and has since found out that wealth is not all it seems to be. Through Nick, Fitzgerald is trying to teach readers that being rich isn’t all it cracks up to be, because wealthy people tend to live immoral, lonely, and unpassionate lives.
Throughout the book, Nick has commented or insinuated about how truly immoral the rich are. Nick, ever since he has moved to West Egg, …show more content…

NIck realizes this much later into the book, but once he does his disillusionment is complete. For example, Nick describes Tom as “One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterwards savors of anti-climax” (Fitzgerald 4), and goes on to tell of how Tom and Daisy had spent a year in France for “no particular reason,” and “drifted here and there unrestfully” (Fitzgerald 5). Daisy and Tom are shown to have dead, hollow, and boringly exciting lives. They have more than they what to do with, and in their attempts to feel excitement, they just sink deeper into boredom. Nick can be quoted as describing Gatsby “ - it was an extraordinary gift hope, a remote readiness such as I have never found in any other person, and which is not likely I shall ever find again. No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end…” (Fitzgerald 2). He thinks Gatsby is the only wealthy person to have truly had a purpose, to have truly lived. Nick, having experienced war and death, wants to live life to its fullest, and is completely disillusioned with the life of the wealth class. The Great Gatsby was written by Fitzgerald as an outlet for his emotions and feelings about the behavior of society as a whole. Fitzgerald wants to inform others on the direction society is going in. As the book progresses, Nick has learned that being rich is not worth it, and that the wealthy upper class lives immoral, lonely, and unpassionate

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