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What Is The Social Class In The Great Gatsby

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“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind” (Fitzgerald). F. Scott Fitzgerald did not just live but conflicted action from his thoughts. F. Scott Fitzgerald is considered one of the most prolific writers of the 19th century. However, he struggled to overcome not only personal conflicts but also issues with the United States. He would utilize his writing to both capture these ideas. One specific novel, that would capture the american society was the “the great gatsby” that illustrates the themes of prohibition, the American dream, and social classes. In this novel the character of Jay Gatsby struggles to find is way in world that is divided by social class and economics.
F. Scott Fitzgerald or Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was birthed September 24, 1896 in …show more content…

Whether what kind of job you have, what kind of character you have, what material you can own, and whether people cared about you or not. The rich, the middle class, and the poor have all divided society. Fitzgerald represented the division in his novel “The Great Gatsby”. In “The Great Gatsby” Jay was a poor man and just pretended to be rich (Upper class) in order to get Daisy but Tom and other individuals in the upper class knew Jay was actually poor. Therefore, the upper class used Jay without actually caring about him; all because Jay was a poor man just trying to fit in. The symbolism of the Green Light was a great example of social class. Jay would sit on his porch and stare across at a green light at Tom and Daisy’s house. The Green light symbolizes money and his location across the pond represents him being in the lower class. Jay was so far from the Green light but would stare at it wishing he was rich. “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.” (Fitzgerald). Scott reminds us that if you are not rich then you will not fit in because the upper class only care for

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In a book about a tragic love story, one would not expect to find a deeper meaning behind the dangers of jealousy or peril of lust. However, in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is a deeper meaning beyond jealousy and love. In The Great Gatsby, the author uses an empathetic storyline as a symbol to unwittingly give a complex depiction of the nuisance that people create that not only destroy our world but our society and gives warning to what will occur if we continue the path of destruction. With this intention, the brilliant opinionated writer, expressed his opinion through symbols such as the characters he uses, the setting the story takes place in, and the objects he uses in the book.

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The impact of socioeconomic status can be examined through a myriad of lenses. F. Scott Fitzgerald aims to show the relationship between socioeconomic status and power. Throughout The Great Gatsby, Tom’s character shows that socioeconomic status is equivalent to power within the novel. Tom puts great pride and emphasis on his socioeconomic status and wealth.

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Not only does the amount of wealth affect social class, but the type of wealth also affects it. It even affects where people live and who people marry as seen with Gatsby and Daisy. The characters social standing affect who they interact and how they are perceived by others. Fitzgerald highlights the different class structures like “New rich” and “Old rich” and the impact of wealth on the people’s lives in those classes. He also shows the superficial nature of the characters and highlights the value placed on wealth.

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Society is constantly under the criticism of authors. Many writers seek to expose certain aspects of American society and their scorn of it. Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald are renowned for their work on this subject. In The Great Gatsby and The Age of Innocence, Fitzgerald and Wharton reveal their cynicism of the societal elite; they find the elite as a severe detriment to American society. Through symbolism and the characterization of their main characters, Wharton and Fitzgerald similarly depict the societal elite as depriving American society from a promising future by refusing to let go of the past.

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In the novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald characterizes the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values. One of the major themes explored in this novel is the Hollowness of the Upper Class. The entire book revolves around money including power and little love. Coincidentally the three main characters of the novel belong to the upper class and throughout the novel Fitzgerald shows how this characters have become corrupted and have lost their morality due to excess money and success and this has led them to change their perspective towards other people and they have been portrayed as short-sighted to what is important in life. First of all, we have the main character of this novel, Gatsby who won’t stop at nothing to become rich overnight in illegal dealings with mobsters such as Wolfsheim in order to conquer Daisy’s heart.”

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The Great Gatsby is arguably Scott Fitzgerald’s most excellent portrayal of the American society in the 1920s when the country was undergoing an unprecedented economic boom. Through its theme of a romantic and prosperous love, the novel offers a strong indictment of the normalization of competing interests that bordered on greed and selfishness. Jay Gatsby, the novel’s principal and central character, seems to know everybody and yet is still somehow unknown to everyone. Gatsby is an extremely ambitious young man who challenges and breaks out of the shackles of social stratification with the abundant fortune he obtains throughout the years by insisting devotion to his pursuit of the American dream. Gatsby also utilizes this massive affluence

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The author characterizes the wealthy by juxtaposing Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, the two affluent characters in the novel. Fitzgerald juxtaposes them by first revealing both as wealthy, introducing them closely, and highlighting their different natures through how they earned their wealth and through the plot to show how the wealthy class with old money is soulless. Although both Tom and Gatsby are prosperous, only Tom is depicted as heartless since he has old money and was in the wealthy class his entire life. Gatsby, however, has new money and since he earned it, he is not described as soulless because he wasn’t always in the wealthy class to where he is adapted their heartless nature. These differences correlate with their personality and with how Fitzgerald condemns the wealthy with old money as callous.

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is known as one of the most famous American writers in the twentieth century. Although Fitzgerald has many other works of short-stories and novels, but his most well known novel is The Great Gatsby. He helped show how the world was during the Jazz Age which is more commonly known as the Roaring Twenties. Many journalists classified him as a cultural artifact and a symbol for the “lost generation”. Many have also said that he symbolized the extravagance and the decline of his generation.

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Jay Gatsby, the title character of the novel “The Great Gatsby” is a man that can not seem to live without the love of his life. Trying to win Daisy over consumes Gatsby’s life as he tries to become the person he thinks she would approve of. What most readers do not realize is that Jay Gatsby’s character mirrors many personality traits and concerns that the author of novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had. In fact, Gatsby and Fitzgerald are similar in that they both had a girl they wanted to win over, took a strong stance on alcohol, and ironically both had similar funerals, also, both people also symbolize the American dream.

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“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (Fitzgerald 179). This quote captures the advantages the upper class has because of their money. Tom and Daisy’s actions left three people dead, yet they received no punishments .They put all their baggage on the lower class, and left them to pick up the pieces.     In The Great Gatsby, the theme of social class is very significant in the book. Scott F. Fitzgerald used the theme of social class to show the reader that it plays a much bigger role in life.

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In the 1920’s, social classes were divided with a large gap. The poor wanted nothing to do with the rich, and the rich wanted even less to do with the poor. In the novel “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, he uses the class structure in the 1920’s to redefine poverty. While the rich people in the novel are material rich, they are still “poor” socially and psychologically. Poverty is shown in a differently in this book than other books being written in this time era, and in doing this, it shows the rich what they are, and how they treat others from a different perspective.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby shows little, if any attention to political issues at the time. In the 1920s, also known as the “Jazz Age” the lifestyle is mostly driven by the wants and desire of individuals. Fitzgerald raises the lack of political concern at the time derived from the characters of the novel. The main political conflict is the fissure between the rich and the poor.

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