Tom is a brutish and physical man who is defined by his arrogant personality and cruel body. He leverages his position, at home, in his marriage, and in his other relationships through the power that is created by his physical strength and inherited wealth. Born in Chicago, Tom attends Yale University where is was a star football player and classmate of the novel's narrator, Nick Caraway. Tom is married to Daisy, and they reside in an opulent mansion located on East Egg. Their marriage is founded on anything but love, and it appears as if both characters are engaged in this union more out of social security rather than a personal connection: the marriage secures their social position within the American landscape. Tom's infidelity with Myrtle accentuates his status due to his mistreatment of her and the physical abuse she suffers at his hands. However, this fact also proves that Tom believes that he can control all those people that are below him in terms of social standing. He uses both Myrtle and George Wilson for his own benefit, and he is more concerned with self-satisfaction and control then with anything else. More than anything else, Tom is an immoral character that does not stand at a moral attention. He is character that finds comfort in his wealth no matter how damaging his wealth and actions are on the numerous characters he encounters.
Important quotations:
p. 6: "He was one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax."
p. 6: "I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game."
p. 7: "It was a body capable of of enormous leverage--a cruel body...'Now don't think my opinion on these matters is final,' he seemed to say 'just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are.'"
p. 26: "So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York...Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train."
p. 28: "'It's a bitch,' said TOm decisively. 'Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs.'"
p. 37: "Making a short deft movement, Tom brok her nose with his open hand."
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posted by amelia - tom character addition.
In some ways, Tom is invincible--he creates an infallible position of power against himself by pitting his rivals against each other and then "retreat[s] back into [his] money or vast carelessness". However, his hubris--excessive pride--leads to his own self-injury; his vulnerability is measured in the number of people he cares about and refuses to "break" by physical or metaphorical means. Judging by how he emerges at the outcome of the book, he is nearly invincible--but his Achilles' heel is his attraction to Myrtle in the end, though he weathers through the worst of it unscathed, her death still hits an untraceable soft spot within him. Myrtle is his hubris, his failed expedition, his injured pride--a swift, bloody reminder that he is not a God, no matter how much his money might convince him otherwise. Tom may not suffer a complete downfall, but Myrtle's "tragic achievement" lends itself enough to a permanent spot in his memory.
"He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car," Tom says to Nick. "And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering—look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful——"
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