Social Hierarchy In The Great Gatsby

Despite society’s expectations of others, the way someone is, is how they were born. One can try and fill empty holes with values, people, house, etc., but once born, that is his/her place in the world. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, it emphasizes the way americans are obsessed with this idea of social hierarchy. Daisy, a gorgeous, nit-witty, blonde haired girl, and her husband Tom, a formal athlete star, who is a big, cheating, and abusive man live in an enormous white mansion in East Egg (one of the two islands located off of Long Island, New York City). The novel makes a naturalism argument about the phony masks that are put on by civilians, which are influenced by the people they encounter, places they visit and …show more content…
In The Great Gatsby there is the West Egg which is known as the middle class, and the East Egg which is the high class, last there is one small area between West Egg and New York, the valley of ashes; the lowest class. This ‘valley’ is a “fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke.” (Fitzgerald 23). Swarming with low class men and women, trying to become more than what they are truly, trying to develop a high and mighty reputation. An example of trying to exceed this look, is a woman, whom Daisy’s husband (Tom Buchanan) is having an affair with; she is known as Myrtle Wilson. Throughout the novel, she is the most masked in the valley of ashes. Even though she is obtaining all of her money through Tom; George Wilson (husband of Myrtle) an owner of a small gas and car shop, has no clue of this affair. Myrtle wants to be the richest and most respected woman, so she drowns the sorrows of her life with sex, money, and parties. When, in reality she still is stuck in the poorest part of New York, with a poor husband and life, and there is nothing she can do about that. On the edge of the valley of ashes is the billboard for Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, an eye doctor. His sign consists of a pair of eyes wearing big round glasses and no nose. He looks over the valley with “his eyes dimmed a …show more content…
Sadly, what is common is the inability to achieve that dream. In this novel, Fitzgerald resembles the ‘american dream’ through a green dock light out on the bay in front of Daisy’s house that flashes at night. The main character, Gatsby, lived in West Egg, with a view of East Egg right across the bay. Gatsby had once been in love with Daisy, before fighting in the war. Full of hope when the war ended that he would be with her once again, what he had not known was that she was already gone in her own new life and family. His house sat on the edge of the shore, while facing the Buchanans, with a long dock that reaches far out into the glistening water to that green light, the spark of hope that was visible, but far out of reach. On some nights he would go to the edge of the dock and “stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way.” (Fitzgerald 20). To Gatsby the light resembles his dream, and as he reaches so far for it, he comes so far from actually achieving it. It was that “Gatsby’s fate takes on mythic dimensions, becoming an allegory for the course of the American nation and for the struggles and dreams of its citizens.” (Barbara 125). So caught up in trying to obtain the green light, but it is pointless because “he did not know that it was already behind him.” (Fitzgerald 193). What he had not realized that this