Essential difference: F. Scott Fitzgerald Campfire
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line. F. Scott Fitzgerald & Essential difference
" I have to write an essay discussing the way contrasts is used to define Tom and Gatsby."
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Look for those scenes in which Gatsby shows himself overreaching for Tom's world - like those pink shirts he displays for Daisy. The tragic difference between Tom and Gatsby is that Tom, although essentially a Neanderthal, has been born to wealth and has instinctively that confidence into which he has been bred. Gatsby, the more intelligent of the two - and the more loving and deserving, and more appreciative of the proper use of wealth, has been born poor and lacks that instinctive social confidence that comes with generations of wealth; and that confidence is everything. Note how Fitzgerald strains for this in the scene where Gatsby drives over to the Buchanans and encounters Tom and his friends who are about to go riding. Gatsby has no horse - that symbol of wealth and confidence that defines Tom - and cannot join them in the ride. That Gatsby should not have a horse is so unlikely as to be ridiculous, but it shows how desperately Fitzgerald is determined to keep horses as the exclusive symbol of Tom's world, a world that Gatsby cannot enter.