Scott Fitzgerald's "Jazz Age" novel The Great Gatsby, characters who have had wealth for a long period of time due to the old aristocracy of the country's wealthiest families, as opposed to those who recently earned their wealth, are depicted as careless and inconsiderate. The best examples of this can be seen in the characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan, a married couple living in East Egg. In the novel, West Egg represents the newly rich, while East Egg and its people, especially Daisy and Tom, represent grace, taste and people who have inherited their wealth. Nick Carraway, the novel's narrator, is tolerant, open-minded, quiet, and a good listener, the exact opposite of Daisy and Tom who are fickle, shallow, and sometimes bored with their wealth. What East Egg possesses in taste, it lacks in heart. It would seem as if only the East Eggers can afford to act careless and inconsiderate of other people's feelings. Those who live in East Egg prove themselves to be careless, arrogant, and inconsiderate bullies who feel they have no need to care about others and their feelings because they have money.
Fitzgerald portrays the newly rich as being vulgar and lacking in social graces and taste. For example, Jay Gatsby, the title character and protagonist of the novel, lives in a monstrously large, Gothic mansion and wears pink suits. In contrast, East Egg possesses grace, taste, and elegance shown through the Buchanan's tasteful home and flowing white dresses worn by Daisy and Jordan Baker, a friend of Daisy's. Towards the beginning of the story, Nick is visiting Tom and Daisy. When he enters he sees Daisy and her friend and says, "They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering . . ." (pg. 12) This makes the girls seem angelic and almost goddess-like. While Nick gets this type of image from Daisy, Nick views Gatsby as a deeply flawed man, dishonest and vulgar, whose extraordinary optimism and power to transform his dreams into reality make him "great" nonetheless.
