The Importance Of Social Class In Old School

Throughout Old School, the narrator establishes the different social classes in the novel, showing the differences between the scholarship kids and the wealthy students. Social groups that are separated by economic status and racial classification damages how the narrator develops his identity because he is trying to assimilate into his environment by hiding race and financial instability. Categorizing people into classes affects humans and leads them to conceal themselves when trying to fit a mold or live up to someone’s standards and/or expectations.
As the narrator is introducing his story, the reader can conclude that financial and racial class plays a big part into how the narrator views himself and the people around him. He constantly …show more content…
Social norms for the students focuses on writing and competing against one another. The boys are stuck in a bubble and they are not experiencing what life truly is beyond the walls of their school yard. When the firefighters are working to put out the fire, close readers will notice the awkward exchange of glances between the drunk book boys and the firefighters. “We dressed so much alike that the inflections we did allow ourselves-tasseled loafers for the playboy, a black turtleneck for the rebel- were probably invisible to an outsider. Our clothes, the way we wore our hair, the very set of our mouths, all this marked us like tribal tattoos”(35). The scene displays two separate worlds, the prep school boys lives and the outsiders (firefighters). A reader might come to the conclusion that this was the point at which the narrator begin to discover how trivial and caught up he is with others impression of him.There are two perceptions featured in this scene, subjective and objective. The speaker has a subjective viewpoint because he is influenced by his what is taking place in his small world. On the other hand, the firefighters are objectively viewing the young men from preconceived notions. Differences they see among themselves are completely irrelevant to outsiders. An outsider’s view they see the boys, who all are cut from the same cloth, not noticing the differences in class or identity. The scholarship kids and the opulent kids …show more content…
“The “Horst Wessel Song” is a nazi marching song, and a very ugly piece of work it is, too” (20). “Horst Wessel Song,” is symbolic to the time period of the Nazi Party’s reign, which brought back memories of trauma for Gershon. Once the narrator apologizes to Gershon they become friends. There is a similarity between Gershon and the speaker. The speaker hides the fact that he was a Jew, while Gershon wore being Hebrew with a badge on his chest. The story of Hartmut and Gershon really touched on the issue of separation between classes. Hartman is a nazi sympathizer who looks down on people he views as less than, such as Gershon. Marxism theory can be applied to this book because it analyzes racial, political, economic and social class struggles affected by society. Marxism’s whole focus is capitalism, white, powerful rich men who makes their income based on the labor intensive jobs of the lower or middle class. The wealthy pays their workers low minimum wage for creating goods and then goes to sell the product at a much more expensive price. Hartman proves how ignorant he truly is, because even though himself and Gershon both have similar laborious service jobs of working with their hands, he sees himself as better just because of. Although to the higher power they are both on the same lower class