Fitzgerald uses white to describe Daisy, and it is fairly certain he used white to depict Daisy's original innocence. Daisy's car is white, her clothes are white and the paint on the walls of her house are white. However, toward the end of the novel Daisy has been corrupted by Gatsby and the whole social scene, and she becomes careless and destructive. A reader can surmise that Fitzgerald is simply showing that even the purest in society can be corrupted and can turn bad.

What is there to be learned about how people lived and behaved the 1920s in New York City from this respected novel? An alert reader finds out that there was racial segregation, and that the rich folks had a kind of fear of the African-American community. The novel does also present a tone that is considered racist by today's standards. And there was negative stereotyping on page 73. Gatsby and the novel's narrator Nick were crossing the Queensboro Bridge and they looked out the window of...

73).
To use the word "bucks" to point out an African-American male, is to ridicule them and put them in the same sub-human group as animals; male deer and rabbits are called "bucks."

In conclusion, The Great Gatsby is still seen, after all these years, as one of the greatest novels written. Not so much for what it represented -- the Roaring Twenties, sudden wealth and arrogance and over-indulgence in parties drenched in alcohol -- but for the quality of its narrative. It's too bad that Fitzgerald himself was far too involved in the consumption of alcohol, and that his career and his life were cut short by the very abuse of alcohol that he wrote so brilliantly about in this novel.

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. (2010). The Great Gatsby. Retrieved August 29, 2011, from http://www.- -- .