Similarities Between East And West Egg In The Great Gatsby

Set in the Golden Age, The Great Gatsby’s recounts the tale of Jay Gatz’s evolution into the social elite. With Gatsby’s new status of wealth, he hopes to regain the his past love, Daisy. However, is that enough? Author Francis Scott Fitzgerald sets the story in the two vastly different locations of East and West Egg to emphasize the division of society that took place in the summer of 1922. Through the geographical and social separation, Fitzgerald is able to expose to the division of society and present the hollowness of the upper-class. Within the first few pages, Fitzgerald uses narration to highlight the contrast between the two locations. “Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in …show more content…
West Egg is a representation of the “Nouveau Riche”. Inhabiters of West Egg are fighters that have climbed their way up the ladder of social class on their earned “new money.” Unfortunately, this is seen as a less respectful way of achieving luxury in the views of the East Eggers. “I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of the newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know” (114). Unlike the East Egg and their designatory remarks towards the lower classes, West Egg is open to the joining of social classes. “Instead of rambling this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of presenting the staid nobility of the countryside-East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety”