The Selfish Use Of Money In The Westing Game By Ellen Raskin

Is money really that important? The novel “The Westing Game” written by Ellen Raskin follows 16 random individuals as they receive a perfect offer; a luxury apartment, in a prime location, for an extremely low price. Thus they all accept their offers for apartments at Sunset Towers. It is later revealed that these 16 people are heirs to Samuel W. Westing's $200 million fortune and his paper company. To access their inheritance, they must compete to find Sam Westing’s murderer. A common theme across this book is the use of money to gain an advantage over others. There are many moments in which characters like Sam Westing use money in a way only beneficial to them.

The first selfish use of money in “The Westing Game” happens very early on.

During the event, they were also grouped into pairs in a seemingly random order, shortly after each team was given a cheque for $10,000. The cheque could only be cashed if both heirs agreed to participate in the murder mystery. All the heirs wanted a chance at winning and all the heirs participated, but this event caused chaos among the heirs. Every heir had a different idea on what to do with the money, some thought they should use the money for personal gain such as Theo Theodorakis and Doug Hoo who decided “half would go to Doug Hoo’s savings account and half to Theo’s parents”. Then others such as Turtle Wexler the youngest of the Wexler family and her partner Flora Baumbach decided to spend their money based on the clues given during the meeting. After analyzing their clues they concluded that they should invest their money “in the stock market”. Each pair spent their money differently and everyone thought their way of spending was better than their partner. The heirs became greedy, and why wouldn’t they? If you were given $10,000 for absolutely free and you can do anything with it, you would obviously focus on self-gain. The part that the heirs forgot about was that this money was given to help them solve the mystery. The heirs started to have tunnel vision, the joy caused by just the thought of what they could do with $10,000 deterred them from the

Samuel W. Westing is not who he seems to be. Sam Westing wasn’t murdered, he faked his death, made a list of people who had relations with him and called them his heirs all to find his ex-wife who he blamed for his daughter's suicide. Westing made many fake identities throughout the story to hide himself such as Barney Northrup, the broker of the Sunset Towers apartments, Sandy McSouthers, the doorman of the Sunset Towers complex, and Julian R. Eastman, the new CEO and head of Westing Paper Products. That's not all, Sam Westing says “I Samuel W. Westing of Westingtown, am born Sam “Windy” Windkloppel”. He changed his name when he immigrated to America to appeal to American consumers. All these disguises are clear forms of trickery, but perhaps the worst form of trickery throughout this entire book was at the end. Although it was revealed that the entire murder mystery was fake, no one had the chance or ability to win the $200 million that was promised. This is proved when Judge J. J. Ford says “That's it. That's it? What about the $200 million?”. The heirs were cheated, and the worst part is that only Turtle Wexler knew of where Sam Westing was now, the heirs couldn’t even approach him. Sam Westing used his money to blind all the heirs and made them do his work for him and didn’t even give them what he