How is Nick affected by West Egg? How has the nature of the place changed him?

Class and social standing are important themes in this
novel and present conflicts to almost every main character. East and West Egg symbolize
two different levels of class and social standing. Tom and Daisy live on East Egg where
the people are well-bred and have class and family money. Nick and Gatsby live on West
Egg where the people are "nouveau riche" - that means, they have money but not breeding.
The green light shining from East Egg represents the envy Gatsby feels towards what he
has always wanted -- the woman that he never gets. The water symbolizes the barrier
between East and West Egg that keeps the characters apart from one another and from
their desires.

Nick
says:

"I lived
at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most
superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between
them."

 In describing his
house, Nick says:

readability="12">

"My own house was an eyesore, but it 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."

By contrast, he
describes Daisy's home thusly:

readability="8">

"Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of
fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really
begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom
Buchanans."

Nick says that
when he came back from his trip back east, he was changed. Where he once thought himself
tolerant, he now found that he wanted things to be more even in the world. He
says:

"When I
came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and
at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with
privileged glimpses into the human
heart."

At the end of the
novel Nick is no longer tolerant of everyone, especially people like Tom and Daisy. They
have destroyed his faith in humanity and turned him into a rather jaded individual. He
says:

"They
were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept
them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . .
."

Read the novel at the
beginning and at the end to see the changes in Nick. This should get you
started.