Tom is magnitudes of order wealthier than Gatsby. Note, in the initial party scene we discover that Gatsby's library is full of “blank” books: nice spines no substance (metaphor anyone). Gatsby does have…. shirts—so many shirts.
Tom and Gatsby are both men in their early thirties, who are wealthy, but Tom comes from old money and Gatsby is a part of the nouveau riche. Due to their difference in social class, they present themselves differently.
Nick describes how the extent of his wealth rather took your breath away . It has been entirely inherited – he doesn't work for a living and presumably never has. The description of him as Tom Buchanan of Chicago suggests his high status and sense of entitlement.
We are told that Gatsby came up from essentially nothing, and that the first time he met Daisy Buchanan, he was “a penniless young man.” His fortune, we are told, was the result of a bootlegging business – he “bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago” and sold illegal alcohol over the counter.
The character is an enigmatic nouveau riche millionaire who lives in a luxurious mansion on Long Island where he often hosts extravagant parties and who allegedly gained his fortune by illicit bootlegging during prohibition in the United States.
Apparently, he started off penniless and made his money selling illegal, over-the-counter liquor in his drug-store empire during the first two years of prohibition.
In his novel, money is divided into two types: new money and old money. New money is the fortune that self-made characters like Gatsby have. Old money encompasses the inherited money owned by Daisy and Tom.
Biography. Daisy Fay was born in 1899 to a wealthy family in Louisville, Kentucky. Like many women of the time, she married for money, particularly to Tom Buchanan.
In some senses Nick can be seen as an 'everyman' – a normal person observing how the rich live and play. But his own family are 'well-to-do' (they own a wholesale hardware business), and his cousin Daisy is rich. He is also a graduate of Yale, one of the most prestigious and expensive universities in the USA.
The character is a wealthy socialite from Louisville, Kentucky who resides in the fashionable town of East Egg on Long Island during the Jazz Age. She is narrator Nick Carraway's second cousin, once removed, and the wife of polo player Tom Buchanan, with whom she has a daughter.
From that day on, James Gatz, the poor farm boy from the Midwest, ceased to exist. Jay Gatsby was sophisticated and born into a wealthy family who had all since passed away, leaving him their fortunes. The moment he stepped onto Dan Cody's yacht, he was a rich man, regardless of the current state of his finances.
Nick is particularly taken with Gatsby and considers him a great figure. He sees both the extraordinary quality of hope that Gatsby possesses and his idealistic dream of loving Daisy in a perfect world.
The metaphor “her voice is full of money” represents Gatsby's desire to obtain Daisy's love. Wealth is posed as a significant attraction for all characters of the novel. And Gatsby sees both values as equal.
Tom is also deeply invested in maintaining the social order. He feels threatened by the idea of the lower classes encroaching on his privileged life. He objects to Gatsby not only because Gatsby is in love with Daisy, but also because Gatsby comes from a poor background.
Without giving too much of the story away—in part because it describes almost any budding author, with that slight touch of autism that never quite connects with the world except through imagination and writing—Carraway eventually winds up back in New York.
Yet Daisy isn't just a shallow gold digger. She's more tragic: a loving woman who has been corrupted by greed. She chooses the comfort and security of money over real love, but she does so knowingly.
He adds that she was the first girl to whom he ever felt close and that he lied about his background to make her believe that he was worthy of her. Eventually, he continues, he and Daisy made love, and he felt as though he had married her.
Tom inherited all his money from his family and hasn't made a dime of it. Instead of investing his time in work he invests it in the finer things in life, such as a big house, trips around the world, or playing the sport of gentlemen known as polo.
When Cody died, he left Gatsby $25,000, but Cody's mistress prevented him from claiming his inheritance. Gatsby then dedicated himself to becoming a wealthy and successful man.
Scott Fitzgerald had the South on his mind when writing "The Great Gatsby." A character in the novel, Tom Buchanan, is based on Aiken native and the greatest polo player ever, Tommy Hitchcock Jr. "He often used obviously real people as inspiration, but Tom Buchanan is such a negative character in the book.
Gatsby's wealth is not based on hard work but on fraud and corruption. Daisy, just like the entire upper class, seems to hide a shallow, decadent, and morally repulsive character behind her pretty face.
In the course of the novel, and no doubt the new film version, we find out what Gatsby is hiding: not only his criminal bootlegging, but also his family name, Gatz, and his poor, ethnic-American roots, which in the end exclude him from the upper-class Anglo-American social circles he hoped to enter.
Why did Daisy marry Tom? Even though she was still in love with Gatsby, Daisy most likely married Tom because she knew he could provide her with more material comforts.
