After reading chapter one I can already tell that I like this book better than Moby-Dick. I think having the characters be able to move around ( as opposed to be being stuck on a whaling ship) makes the story much more interesting. In the first chapter the narrator Nick Carraway remembers how his father decided to finance him for a year to learn the bonds business. He moves out to Long Island to a part called West Egg. Soon after moving there he goes to visit his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom. I’m kind of confused as to why Fitzgerald would start the book off with what seems to be an unimportant interaction- especially when Nick doesn’t seem to even know his cousin well and he doesn’t seem to like Tom Buchanan. I think he may have put it in the book to show how Nick feels out of place in his new environment even when with people that are supposed to be ‘family.’ On page 12 Nick observes his cousin and her friend,

” They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening, too, would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.”

I think as the book goes on Nick will continue to see all of the differences between the social classes in the East and the West but also in the smaller areas of East Egg and West Egg. Also after reading about East and West Egg I looked it up online and decided that our class should go here for a field trip : http://greatgatsbyboattour.org/