Nick self-deprecatingly punctures the illusion that his family comes from nobility-but instead, he makes himself into another kind of nobility: a family that actually has achieved the American Dream of wealth and respectability through hard work. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day. He’s joking, but this is the same logic that makes people buy designer sunglasses: you may not be able to afford the actual clothes, but you still get to have a little reflected glamour. It may be a small house, but at least Nick gets to live near millionaires. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard … My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires-all for eighty dollars a month. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. I lived at West Egg, the – well, the least fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. Except, we think this might be a little like the, “but I have a lot of _ friends” excuse to make someone not sound racist or xenophobic.) Maybe he has the “natural decencies” that other members of high society don’t. Gatsby may be low-class, but Nick still manages to see something good in him, anyway. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Some people are naturally just nicer and more honest: they have more “sense of the fundamental decencies.” But does Nick believe that poor people can be born with these fundamental decencies, too, or do you have to be rich to have natural class? Here, Nick says that money isn’t the only thing that some people are born to. Eckleburg, a major symbol in the book.I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth. Judgment is something that comes up frequently in the narration by Nick Carraway, and by the eyes of T.J. Judgment, wealth, and infidelity are three motifs that occur in the novel The Great Gatsby by F. What are three motifs in The Great Gatsby? Nick served in the army in WWI, and now that he is home has decided to move east and try to become a bond trader on Wall Street. Nick begins by explaining his own situation. It is 1922, and Nick has moved East to seek his fortune as a bond salesman, a booming, thriving business that, he supposes, "could support one more single man." Fitzgerald introduces one of the novel's key themes, wealth, upon Nick's arrival in the East.Īdditionally, what happened in Chapter 1 of The Great Gatsby?Ĭhapter one of The Great Gatsby introduces the narrator, Nick Carraway, and establishes the context and setting of the novel. Similarly, what is the theme of Chapter 1 in The Great Gatsby? The story begins. Then, what are some symbols in The Great Gatsby?Īnalyzing The Great Gatsby Symbols The green light on Daisy's dock. Because Gatsby's quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream, the green light also symbolizes that more generalized ideal. The Green Light Gatsby associates it with Daisy, and in Chapter 1 he reaches toward it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal.