When reading the first few pages of The Great Gatsby, I was struck by a certain statement on page 2, the narrator's notion that "a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth". My curiosity was peaked when I read this quote because I have occasionally wondered if a concept like that were the truth. At first it seems irrational, but when you think about it we are all different and we each have a different "sense of the fundamental decencies" (assuming that my understanding of this phrase is correct). Some people are more kind than others, some are more athletic, some are more intelligent. This is not to say that some people are somehow better than others, but merely that we are all unique and our skills and talents all lie in different areas. When I began thinking about the meaning of this quote, I googled the passage to see what others had said about it. I was led to a Yahoo Answers page where the general consensus was that the narrator was stating that "rich people are born with better ethics/morals/outlook than poor people". I have not read more than a few pages of the book so far, so I cannot say for sure if this is or isn't the narrator's overall point of view, but at least at this point I don't feel that this is at all what he is saying. He is not saying that a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth, favoring wealthy people, or that those with a better sense of these decencies will end up being wealthy. In fact, in this statement, wealth is not brought up at all. But maybe I'm just missing something.
