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Is Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby old money or new money?

Nick is related to old money because he is Daisy's cousin. Like Tom, Daisy comes from a wealthy background and might be considered a "Kentucky Blueblood." Importantly, however, Nick's own nuclear family is not old money or new money. His family background is probably better labelled as "upper middle class."


In discussing his family, Nick first mentions the moral upbringing he received as a prominent facet of his family life. This moral component of his background is foundational to themes of the work and to the commentary the novel presents regarding ambition, wealth and the American Dream.


After establishing his moral inheritance, Nick then goes on to share the fact that his family is well-off but that his father also works for a living (in contrast to Tom and Daisy, who have so much money they do not need to work). 


Nick boasts a bit about his roots:



"My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations." 



And after suggesting that his family claimed lineage with the Dukes of Buccleuch, Nick reveals the irony that he is so hard-pressed to avoid throughout the novel and relates the fact that he left the Mid-West because "[i]nstead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle-West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe." Suggesting the prominence of a provincial family name is an ironic jab from Nick at both his family's air of aggrandizement and his own flawed and naive sense that real life is something that only happens outside the Mid-West. Nick learns a bitter lesson about this assumption over the course of the novel. 


When his father agrees to pay for Nick to try his hand at life out east for one year, we can see Nick seeming to reject whatever status his family name may have afforded him in whatever "Middle-Western city" he had come from. He chooses instead to be a bonds man - - a profession he seems to have very little understanding of - - and to pursue a chance at a glamorous life on the east coast. 


(This story is very much aligned with Fitzgerald's real-life biography as the son of a middle-class family in the Mid-West who goes east to a highly competitive and renowned college then spends years ingratiating himself into a society of the American elite.)


We should note here also, if only in passing, that Nick's arrangement with his father indicates a very exhaustible wealth in comparison to that possessed by Daisy and Tom. Nick can live for a year on his father's dime, but not forever. 


So, in contrast to Daisy and Tom, Nick is not from a background of great wealth. When he arrives on the east coast it is not in opulence.  


He has enough money to rent a bungalow, but he suggests that he simply got lucky in finding the little house in a nice neighborhood. He describes his rented house early in the novel as "an eyesore," emphasizing its contrast to his neighbors' "two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season."



"My own house was an eyesore, but is was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires -- all for eighty dollars a month." 



Nick's background, ultimately, aligns him better with the boot-straps, rags-to-riches, humble-Mid-Western-beginnings background story of Jay Gatsby than it does with his cousin Daisy. Like Gatsby, Nick is an outsider to the "rather distinguished secret society to which [Daisy] and Tom belonged."

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