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How Is Tom Portrayed In The Great Gatsby

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The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a portrait of the American society during the Roaring Twenties, a time period described as a period of economic prosperity. The Great Gatsby portraits mostly the life of the upper class families who were born into wealth and prosperity, but the book also displays the difficulties one might face climbing the ladder of success in America during the Roaring Twenties.
The main characters in the story are Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Nick Carraway (narrator of the story) and James Gatz, better known as Jay Gatsby. These are all a part of the elite in the society; but especially Tom and Daisy Buchanan.
Fitzgerald emphasizes the gap between the elitist social groups by putting them into different areas. The characters that live in the East …show more content…

When hearing about the lives of the characters living in East Egg, Fitzgerald focuses on the materialistic values, which emphasizes the shallowness of the characters; that materialistic values are in fact the only values that they have. The shallowness and the need for artificial acknowledgement can be seen on page 13 where Tom Buchanan shows his mansion to Nick; “’I’ve got a nice place here’, he said…… ‘It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.’….. We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space..” The only thing important to Tom Buchanan is to show how grand his mansion is, and Fitzgerald exposes this in a brilliant and yet subtle way

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Fitzgerald creates clear distinctions between the upper and lower classes primarily through the use of the valley of ashes. The valley of ashes is nothing but a grey wasteland where “Ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke” but it is also the home of the poor, “The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land”. This is very much different to East Egg, where the wealth live which is described that “Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water”. This distinct different between settings shows the differences of the classes but also the hollowness of the upper

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