Significance Of Home In The Great Gatsby

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A home is more than just a place of residence; it can be a symbol of the owner’s lifestyle, personality, and status. F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays each character’s unique personality with a corresponding abode that suits them perfectly. Nick Carraway’s small shanty fits his reserved lifestyle and serves as a catalyst. Although Gatsby and the Buchanan family both live in mansions, their differences and secrets are revealed behind the closed doors. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald allows the reader to understand the characters not only through words but through their homes. The narrator of the story, Nick Carraway, possesses traits that reflect his house through his personality and importance. Nick is a businessman who is connected to wealthy …show more content…
Their home is described by Nick as “even more elaborate as I expected, a cheerful, red-and-white Georgian colonial mansion overlooking the bay”. This demonstrates their wealthy lifestyle. The description continues with “the front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing new with reflected gold and wide open to the warm, windy, afternoon. We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space fragilely bound into the house by large French windows at either end”. Fitzgerald focuses largely on the windows and space of the house because it is distant, spacious, and empty, like the relationship between Tom and Daisy. Though it appears to be the picture perfect, happy marriage, there are much darker tones to be heard if one would pay attention because Tom is engaged in an affair, and Daisy is too naïve to acknowledge it. The apartment Tom rents, symbolic of his second life with Myrtle, also represents the temporary aspects of an affair. When Tom says, “I’ve got a nice place here,” he is showing his obsession to upholding his upper-class image, for Tom’s house is big just like his ego. The Buchanan’s, like their home, are stereotypical characters created on the premise of an upper-class wealthy family in the
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