Compare and contrast East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby.

Further, East Egg is more removed from the city, farther away from the horrible valley of ashes; West Egg is closer.  The residents of East Egg can retire from the hustle and bustle of New York City as well as avoid, for the most part, the sight of the valley -- a constant reminder of the unintended effects of the industry and economy that has made so many East Egg residents so rich.  These folks can escape to their own little world whenever they choose, leaving everyone else to deal with the huge divide between the haves and the have-nots and the corruption of the American Dream. 

Nick alludes to this in the end, when he calls Tom and Daisy "careless people [who] smashed up things and creates and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...."  The wealthy, high-status residents of East Egg are much more able to avoid anything ugly, any truths they don't want to face, i.e. their own responsibility in creating and maintaining a status quo that prevents others from achieving the American Dream.

Compare and contrast East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby.

As has already been suggested, East Egg is the place where the established wealthy people live.  The homes are old and classic, and there are all the accoutrements of the rich--such as stables and polo fields.  Tom and Daisy live here.  It's the more sedate and dignified of the two Eggs.

West Egg is where the rich Gatsby lives, it's true--but right next to his new, European-inspired mansion is Nick's $80-a-month shack.  Gatsby's money is "new," and he would have had no option to build in East Egg.  Instead, he builds an out-of-place home on West Egg.

Interestingly enough, though, there are plenty of East Egg men and women who show up at Gatsby's parties with people other than their spouses and act like drunken fools once they're there.  Apparently the behavior while on the East Egg must be proper and appropriate to the dignity of "old" money.  A visit to the West Egg, however, aparently allows them to be as wild and dissolute as they wish. 

This dichotomy of East and West Egg appearance and behavior is one of the great hypocrisies found in this novel. 

Compare and contrast East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby.

East Egg and West Egg are two communities differentiated by the socioeconomic status of their residents. The connotations of "East" and "West" are also important here, for although these small towns are in New York, Fitzgerald intended the names and the divisive nature of their reputations to be references to the Eastern United States and the West: bastions of old money and family connections, and new industry and the frontier spirit, respectively. The East and West connotations also conjure up different ideas about morality, another theme in the novel: the West represents more traditional family values and the East a more sophisticated and perhaps decadent way of life. Gatsby's decision to build his grand mansion in West Egg is a tribute to his own Midwestern upbringing, but also a bit of a put down of the snobbery associated with the East. Narrator Nick Caraway says West Egg is "the less fashionable of the two," and describes the way that "the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water."

Fitzgerald, like Gatsby, was enamored of the wealthy classes, those with "old money," and it is a theme in many of his novels and short stories, perhaps nowhere more than in The Great Gatsby. It is also true that West Egg and East Egg are need for the Long Island communities Fitzgerald lived near; he rented a house in Great Neck, just  few mikes from Kings Point (West Egg) and across the bay from Sands Point (East Egg). Fitzgerald was friends with sportswriter Ring Lardner, and the two often drank together. They also spent time socializing with newspaper publish Herbert Swope, who was know for having loud raucous parties. The influence on the novel's characters, setting and events can clearly be seen in Fitzgerald's own life. 

Compare and contrast East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby.

Think of your question as a battle of the riches! East Egg and West Egg are areas of New York separated by a small bay. The residents of East Egg are considered "old money," which means that wealth has been in their families for generations and generations. Think of people like the Rockefellers or the Kennedys.  The people living there have never known a life with out riches and comfort. Daisy lives here with her brutish husband, Tom.

Across the bay, the residents of West Egg are those that are considered of "new money." These people have made their money within their own lifetimes, and many have lived in poverty or less comfortable means before making it big. Think of people like Oprah Winfrey.  Jay Gatsby lives in West Egg.

The East Eggers generall consider those in West Egg as being gaudy, flashy and of lower status. Examples are the types of people who come to Gatsby's wild parties in their flashy clothes and gaudy cars. As one might say, they are the "wannabes." They tend to look down their noses at parties like Gatsby throws.

This difference sets up the conflicts between Tom and Gatsby, and rich and less rich in the novel.

Compare and contrast East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby.

East Egg and West Egg are both enormously wealthy suburbs of New York City, located on Long Island where they face the ocean. East Egg is the home of those people who enjoy the highest social prestige, as well as their money. Their fortunes have been inherited and their roots run deep in American society. Theirs is "old money." The East Eggers place great value on tradition, family background, social convention, and manners, and they look with contempt upon others who were not born to their kind of wealth. The Buchanans live in East Egg. Tom and Daisy are example of the old money and social snobbery of East Egg.

Those who live in West Egg, like Gatsby, are also very wealthy, but they are the social newcomers who have made their money through commerce (legal or otherwise). They lack the sense of entitlement found among the East Eggers, and they are not "refined" or "polished" in their manners. Gatsby represents this social class. He owns a mansion and dresses well, but he lacks the background of an old and well established family. He is uneducated. He has a great deal of money, but he displays it very conspicuously--a sign of terrible taste to someone like Tom Buchanan.

By developing the social differences between East Egg and West Egg, Fitzgerald develops one the novel's themes. No matter how wealthy Gatsby might become, he would never belong to the Buchanans' upper social class because he was not born into it. He would always be an outsider.

Compare and contrast East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby.

East Egg and West Egg represent the difference in social class between Gatsby and Daisy. The people of East Egg have inherited great wealth and social prestige. Their families have lived in the East for generations; they feel proud of their traditional heritage.They have attended the finest private schools in the East and gained a particular kind of selfish sophistication. They move within their own narrow, snobbish social circle and feel superior to those who are not members of their privileged class. This is Daisy's world.

West Egg is the home of millionaires, also, but their money has not been inherited, and they haven't had it very long. They have earned money quickly during the economic boom of the Roaring 20s, through legal and illegal means alike. The people of West Egg lack formal education and a tradiitonal family heritage that goes back several generations; they lack sophistication and flaunt their wealth, proud of how much money they possess. Gatsby is typical of the West Eggers. He was born into poverty in North Dakota, far from the Eastern establishment, and earned an immense fortune through his association with a gangster. Unlike the people in East Egg, Gatsby is not a snob and does not understand that having money will never make him socially acceptable in upper-class society.

Compare and contrast East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby.

The main difference between the two Eggs is that the East Egg contains mostly families with hereditary wealth; "Old Money," passed down through generations. Their belief is that breeding and station comes from within, with their families set up as symbolic nobility for the rest of the city. The West Egg, in contrast, contains many families of "New Money," who have earned or otherwise come into their wealth recently, perhaps in a single generation. The East Egg looks down on the West Egg, considering them to be pretenders who aspire to a social status to which they are not entitled. Even Daisy is somewhat disgusted by West Egg:

She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village -- appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
(Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, mrbye.com)

Her upbringing is opposed to the work that has created wealth instead of inheriting it, and she cannot see past her prejudices to understand how similar the two Eggs really are. Gatsby, who fast becomes a star citizen for his parties, is a symbol of New Money, and he is scorned by the East Egg, even though his behavior is almost identical to their own. What they share is wealth; what they do not share is an inclusionary mindset.

Compare and contrast East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby.

"It was a matter of chance that I rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America," Nick Carraway observes early in the novel, as he describes the two nearly identical land masses that jutted into the ocean off the coast of Long Island, and were named simply West Egg and East Egg.  The seemingly innocuous names of these bits of land belie what Carraway describes as "the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them".  West Egg, where Carraway rents what he describes as an "eyesore" for his  home, is also the home of one Jay Gatsby and his mansion, a "factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy", complete with tower, ivy, and manicured lawn and gardens.  Gatsby's mansion, while gorgeous, is not just an imitation of a French manor, but also symbolizes the imitation life he was worked to create since he was a teenager.  Across a small bay were what Carraway describes as "the white palaces of fashionable East Egg", a community of people who consider themselves "old money" and thus authentic and superior in every way to the "new money" of Jay Gatsby across the water. 

Compare and contrast East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby.

In the first chapter, Nick Carraway, the narrator, says that West Egg is the "less fashionable" of the two, while East Egg is populated with "white palaces [that] glittered" on the water.  Nick describes Gatsby's mansion, a "colossal affair" that attempts to imitate a fancy French hotel with its tower, ivy, marble swimming pool, and massive lawn.  It sounds a bit gauche compared to the home of the Buchanans.  Tom and Daisy's home is "a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay."  Gatsby's home is constructed to look like something it is not, just as the man himself has been.  Tom and Daisy's home doesn't have to prove anything to anyone because its owners don't have to either.  Further, descriptions of Tom's family as "enormously wealthy" and his "string of polo ponies" that he brought with him help to make it clear that East Egg is populated by families which possess old money, the kind of money that one inherits and for which one does not work.  Gatsby has new money, money that has had to be earned and which is, therefore, less valuable in terms of status.

In The Great Gatsby, where does Fitzgerald illustrate the differences between East Egg and West Egg, and highlight their moral values, lifestyles, and social relationships?

Fitzgerald does a wonderfully succinct job in describing the moral value systems, lifestyles, and social relationships of East Egg, West Egg, and the Valley of the Ashes in just a few short (but very pertinent) paragraphs.  For example, the absolute best place to find the most information about East Egg and West Egg is right at the beginning of the novel when Nick (the narrator) first speaks of the subject:

Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out onto the most domesticate body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.  They are not perfect ovals--like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed and flat at the contact end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead.  To the wingless  a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

Nick then goes on to describe how the two aren't similar in regards to setting and character:

I lived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. . . . Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there.

In other words, the filthy rich live in the two Eggs.  However, there is a big difference between them:  East Egg holds the "old rich" who have always known money while West Egg holds the "new rich" who have only recently acquired wealth.

In regards to the Valley of the Ashes, the best place to look for that description is in the Chapter 2 (which serves as a nice foil to Chapter 1).  The Valley of the Ashes is in direct contrast with the Eggs, and is described as such:

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land.  This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

Further, the setting highlights the morality of the place and is followed up nicely by the description of a sort of morbid "god" that is Doctor T. J. Eckleburg who watches over the immorality with disgust.

I adore how Fitzgerald masters the art of pinpointing the value systems here by highlighting the spendthrift ways of the filthy rich and the morbidity of the dirt poor, . . . and he does it only through setting.  What a genius!

What are the major differences between West Egg and East Egg in The Great Gatsby?

The primary difference between the two Long Island beach communities known as East Egg and West Egg concerns the class distinction between the two areas. The residents of East Egg hail from old money and have inherited most of their wealth. They have been wealthy for generations and believe they are superior to West Egg residents.

In contrast, West Egg residents are considered the "new rich" and have recently amassed their wealth. While East Egg residents tend to behave more formally and sophisticated, West Egg residents like Jay Gatsby are more ostentatious with their wealth and publicly engage in revelries, which would be considered somewhat lowbrow in East Egg.

The symbolic nature of both areas underscores the characters's backgrounds and highlights the fact that Gatsby will never be accepted into the East Egg community. Even though he is directly across the bay from Daisy, he will never be able to complete his transformation to become a member of East Egg's social elite.

What are the major differences between West Egg and East Egg in The Great Gatsby?

The East Egg and West Egg are symbolic locations based on Long Island, New York.  The East Egg is Old Money, and the West Egg is New Money.  Naturally the East Egg looks down on the West Egg.

This difference is used to highlight the importance of money and class in Gatsby's world.