The Great Gatsby, New Money vs Old Money

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New Money Vs. Old Money Some of which makes Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby such a favorite piece is the way he is able to analyze the society of which he was also a part of. Through his characters, he not only captures a snapshot of middle class and upper class American life in the 1920s, but also channels a series of criticism as well. Through the characterization in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald demonstrates the American society in the 1920s while being historically accurate; he did this by emphasizing social groupings and how they do or do not interact with each other. The Jazz Age society is clearly shown in The Great Gatsby. The Jazz Age was on a very dangerous path when people such as Tom Buchanan, Daisy Buchanan, and Jordan Baker had power/say in society, they worked hard to ensure no one else would get as much power as they had. Through Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald demonstrates the Jazz Age, someone who has worked hard and profited from listening and responding to the demands of the society. Fitzgerald is urging a reconsideration of where society is and where it is going. Fitzgerald carefully sets up his novel into distinct groups but, in the end, each group has its own problems. By creating distinct social classes-old money, new money, and no money-Fitzgerald sends strong messages about the elitism running throughout society. The first and most obvious group Fitzgerald attacks is, of course, the rich. He presents two distinct types of wealthy people. First, there are people like the Buchanans and Jordan Baker who were born into wealth. Their families have had money for many generations, and are known as the ‘old money’. Tom Buchanan was the perfect example of the ‘old rich’ “... a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-on that everything afterward savors of anticlimax. His family were enormously

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