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Literary Lense In The Great Gatsby

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Looking at The Great Gatsby through our new literary lense, Clash of Class, I was able to understand the social divide that is very apparent throughout the novel. Often times The Great Gatsby is looked at as a love story, but there is much more to the historic novel than just love. The Clash of Class lense looks deeper, beyond money and power, into the novel and required me to really explore the differences between East Egg( Old money) and West Egg (New Money). Money is a defining quality throughout The Great Gatsby in determining social class, but looking deeper into the novel through our literary lense showed me that there is more to social hierarchy than just money. Nick expresses throughout chapter one that money is not the only thing people are born of when he says “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 …show more content…

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. If Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.” (Page 5, paragraph 2). Looking through the Clash of Class perspective, I grasped that Nick is comparing the difference between “Old money” and “New money” by introducing us to his theory. just like one can be born into social class, you can also be born into natural decencies. It is obvious throughout the book that many people within the East Egg community were often depicted as shallow, materialistic, and self-centered, while those of West Egg have a much more decent, morally upright, and humane attitude

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