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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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It is made evident by how his house is described before he was formally introduced in person, as Fitzgerald wrote “Their house was even more elaborate than I expected… and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch”(6). The majority of the paragraph explains the greatness of the house before barely mentioning that Tom is also there. As the author had disdain for those who were old money, he specifically ignorantly wrote Tom. His wife Daisy sarcastically states: ‘He dreads deep books with long words in them.’(13). This further establishes the notion that he represents the old money-rich white elite.

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The Great gatsby is the story of several characters who try to accomplish the American dream and live a carefree lifestyle. Three characters who embody this movent are Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, and Daisy. The live through illusions to escape their realities and try to impress one another with their riches, or devotion to each other. Fitzgerald uses these characters to represent some of the real life illusion of the time such as gender equality, achieving american dream through climbing the social ladder, and returning to a moral code like laws of prohibition. II.

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The Great Gatsby is a well known, classic book written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is set in the 1920s, the jazz age, which is the time period where social and economic changes occured and allowed people to go away from old traditions and embrace new ideas (Alchin, Linda). The book is narrated by a man, Nick Carraway, who is seeking the american dream. He moves in next door to a millionaire, Jay Gatsby, who has a love affair with an already married women, Daisy Buchanan. Daisy Buchanan a beautiful woman that is married to a man named Tom, but has a love affair with a guy she previously loved, and has to decide who she actually loves.

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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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Social Locations and Tom Buchanan In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, described as a hulking, hyper-masculine, and heavily rich man from East Egg, is time and time again presented as aggressive and entitled. Being so rich, Tom continues to use his status to get what he wants, and is indifferent to those he hurts in doing so. A great deal of this behavior stems from Tom’s social locations, or markers of his identity, which includes him being a rich white male from old money in the 1920s.

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitgerald is about how people with a high social standing can achieve their American Dream. The Great Gatsby is about Jay and Daisy who fell in love but, she married someone else when he went to war. He tries to win her back showing her that he has money. Fitzgerald uses Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan in order to illustrate his theme regarding society in the 1920s; the power of money was the way to a person's version of the American Dream.

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People say that with power comes responsibility, however, the true saying is when “knowledge comes power, good character will give you respect.” While that is true, knowledge can be such a great thing. In literature, sometimes, the arrogant one can have the knowledge to survive. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s represents Tom as an aggressive alcoholic, who uses his old money in many lustrous and entertaining ways and tries to become.

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The story of the Great Gatsby has a rather tragic ending. When tensions that were built throughout the story finally erupt, it leads to Myrtle Wilson being killed by a car, Jay Gatsby being murdered by George Wilson, and George Wilson committing suicide after killing Gatsby. So the big question after reading the book is who's responsible for all of this bloody trouble? After reading the book I think the best person to point your finger at is Tom Buchanan.

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Wealthy people during the 1920s were very careless and shallow. As the richer, they became the more they fade away from their morals. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, he writes about Gatsby’s destiny and how people during that society “helped” him. The only help that he got was people’s shallowness. Gatsby’s destiny was to have Daisy fall in love with him again by using his wealth.

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The Great Gatsby is an American novel written by Scott Fitzgerald. On the surface, the book revolves around the concept of romance, the love between two individuals. However, the novel incorporates less of a romantic scope and rather focuses on the theme of the American Dream in the 1920s. Fitzgerald depicts the 1920’s as an era of decline in moral values. The strong desire for luxurious pleasure and money ultimately corrupts the American dream which was originally about individualism.

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" It is here that Tom essentially recognizes Gatsby's way of living, however illegal it may be, as worthless due to his pretentious belief that the upper class consists only of those with old money and excludes those with newly hard earned wealth. With the application of imagery, Fitzgerald separates Tom and Gatsby's background and shows its effects on the traits and thought processes of each character, which adds to the diversity that creates such a rift between classes within itself that it essentially dismantles

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1244 Words | 5 Pages

The Great Gatsby is hailed as a great piece of 1920 's fiction due to its detailing of a new, fast paced America, and the way that America affected the population. These affects manifested as traits in people, and further developed into stereotypes. In the post World War 1 America this novel is set in, industry and technology were becoming readily available to the public, cementing these stereotypes into our population as we quickly moved along at a new pace. In The Great Gatsby, these people, actions, and relationships, are represented by the four main characters: Nick, Daisy, Tom, and Jay. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses these characters to symbolize the stereotypical people of a modern America.

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The characters put wealth, power, and desires over moral values and respect for themselves and others. Fitzgerald’s makes it obvious that he believes people should not substitute their values for a materialistic life. The characters’ desire to achieve the American dream outweighs moral convictions, resulting in scandalous and fatal actions. A critical perspective that is approached throughout the entire novel and is most helpful in understanding the theme is the Marxist criticism.

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Arguably one of the most complex works of American Literature, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald displays a satirical United States taking place in the early twenties in New York. The roaring twenties often portrayed a happy time immediately following World War 1 however, it gave off a false feeling of joy and many people were truly unhappy. Even though Nick Carraway shows a realistic image of himself, The Great Gatsby encompasses an illusion created in this time period and portrays this image through the atmosphere surrounding the actions of its characters; it ultimately shows a conflict against reality, identical to that to the early 20th century. The Great Gatsby shows the upper class and their habits, which involved: carelessness,

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[...] Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans.” ( Fitzgerald 1-15) Nick stated this showing the divide in the book of old and new money, which reflected the culture in the US in the

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