Exploring the theme of social class within the novel 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott. Fitzgerlard

Authors Avatar by luciejelfs (student)

Lucie Jelfs

Response to the Great Gatsby based on Social Class

In ‘The Great Gatsby’ the first instance of social class is when we find out that Nick is privileged. ‘haven’t had all the advantages that you’ve had.’ Nick is telling us about advice that his father had given him – from this we can clearly see that Nick is better off than some people. Nick also suggests that you are born into your class by saying ‘decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth’. This shows us that at the time the book was written people didn’t work their way up the social ladder and could not move through the classes very easily, instead they were born into and expected to stay in one class.

        The next significant mention of class, in my opinion, is ‘I wanted the world to be uniform … I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses’. To me Nick is suggesting that he doesn’t want people to be divided by class, but that he wants everyone to be together and equal. To others this foreshadows that inequality between classes will play a big part in the story because Nick is saying what he wanted and not what actually happened. We also see that Nick is unhappy with the class difference when he says ‘well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre’. This shows that Nick is unhappy with the split between classes because he is privileged but cannot afford to live in the posher area of New York.  Further into the novel we see again that Nick doesn’t like the class splits and how they have affected people. ‘I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away’. Nick is not happy with the attitude and the way the upper classes behave. A reader may get the impression that he isn’t wealthy himself and is jealous of the rich or that he isn’t as rich as most people and doesn’t want to be because he is put off by the way that they come across.

Join now!

        Another significant mention of social class is in the conversation between Nick and Jordan Baker. ‘I know somebody there’

‘I don’t know a single-’. From this I can see that the classes don’t mix with one another because the people who live in East Egg – Daisy and Jordan – do not know many people from the West Egg; apart from Gatsby who is fairly well known anyway. This gives me a clear image of the way people in that time would have seen other classes – they knew that they shouldn’t mix with one another and that they should ...

This is a preview of the whole essay