The two novels, The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye, have two characters who are very similar but at the same time, different from each other. Tom Buchanan can be considered one of the antagonists in The Great Gatsby, and can be compared to the character of Stradlater from The Catcher in the Rye. Tom is sort of a grown-up Stradlater and by knowing each one of them, we can learn a lot. Their relation makes one of The Great Gatsby's themes extremely evident, which is the falsity and hollowness of the wealthy class in the 1920's. Based on their similarities, we can conclude that when Tom was younger, he was a sort of a Stradlater, and he only grew up to be a worse man, who is only interested in money and appearance. Even though these novels were written in different decades, the 20's and 50's are still similar for the importance of people always wanting to look good and superior no matter what their age is. .
Tom Buchanan is a wealthy man of the 1920's. His wealth is certainly his power to think that he is superior to others. Tom believes that a man's life is about having a rich wife and an excellent status in society. He is an uptown guy married to Daisy, who is also an uptown woman. He is capable of going over people, such as Gatsby, in order to maintain his status. When he realizes that his wife is flirting with Gatsby, Tom starts to criticize him in order to show that he is superior to Gatsby, who is not a blue blood man. His superiority is shown when Tom says: "An Oxford man! Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit" (Fitzgerald 129; ch. 7). He means that it does not matter if Gatsby is rich now and went to Oxford because what really matters to Tom is that Gatsby is still not one of them. When he refers to a pink suit, he means that Gatsby is tacky and is trying to be rich but will never be at Tom's level. Tom keeps referring to superiority throughout the novel like when he says that Gatsby is still nobody compared to him: "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr.