Examples Of Birth In The Great Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald shows that the situation that one in born into determines many aspects of his or her life and one can never truly transcend these circumstances. One aspect of life that birth affects is social status. In the book, the nouveau riche inhabitants of West Egg can never truly fit in with the ancestral East Egg families. Daisy Buchanan, an East Egg woman, is “appalled by West Egg,” and her husband Tom believes that the “newly rich people are just big bootleggers” (107). They believe that they are superior to the West Egg people because, as East Eggers, they were born into wealth, while the West Egg people needed to work to earn it for themselves because they were not born into luxurious lives. Daisy and

Throughout the entire book, Gatsby’s life revolves around his love for Daisy, as he imagines what their lives could be like together. He even attempts to persuade her to leave her husband Tom Buchanan, a prominent man from East Egg. However, unlike Tom, Gatsby does not have “facilities,” meaning that he does not have a “comfortable family standing behind him” (149). This shows the differences in the births of Tom and Gatsby, and that they are not of similar pedigree. Tom clearly has an advantage, granted to him by his birth into an ancestral East Egg family. This leads Daisy to choose Tom in the end, and she “vanishe[s] into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing” (149). Daisy’s rejection of Gatsby due to his inferior social class shows that Tom, the upper class man of respectable birth, and Daisy are connected by their illustrious East Egg status, and that this is something that Gatsby can never attain due to the lesser conditions of his own original birth. Later, at the end of the book, Gatsby is killed, and Daisy does not send “a message or a flower,” nor does she attend his funeral. This is Daisy’s ultimate rejection of Gatsby, and further shows that during his lifetime, he is not able to overcome the situation of his birth and rise to Daisy’s social class to maintain their