Great Chain of Being

The Great Chain of Being is a metaphor for a hierarchy that promises order but, in Raymond Peepgass’s thoughts, leads downward to exclusion and obscurity. The image becomes pointedly social rather than abstract: family, reputation, and affection offer little protection when money determines who is remembered and who counts. Around it, the novel places fortunes, philanthropy, elite institutions, and private anxieties in a world where status is displayed—and can be lost.

The Image and Its Social Meaning

Peepgass imagines a chain descending at a thirty-degree slope into a gully beneath Interstate 75. The image gives physical shape to his fear of a life without distinction: not a secure place in an ordered hierarchy, but a downward slide toward invisibility. His reflection is prompted by Martha Croker’s loneliness after Charlie Croker left her. Although Ray Peepgass has made her visible to others again, he wonders what would remain of his own life if he died, and who would care enough to publish an obituary. The contrast makes the metaphor intimate: social rank is measured not only in money, but in whether anyone notices a person’s absence.

Peepgass sets family rhetoric against material circumstances. In the South, he thinks, people speak of family, but a starter rental in Collier Hills carries less standing than a mansion in West Paces Ferry in Buckhead. His chain therefore does not simply describe an abstract ladder of rank; it exposes the distance between the value a community claims to honor and the wealth by which it actually sorts people.

Wealth, Recognition, and the Atlanta Elite

The wider narrative supplies concrete versions of that hierarchy. Charlie Croker’s Turpmtine Plantation encompasses 29,000 acres, fifty-nine horses, twenty-two mules, forty dogs, thirty-six buildings, and a mile-long landing strip with jet-fuel pumps and a hangar. The estate makes ownership visible on an immense scale: Croker’s wealth is not merely a figure but a landscape and a collection of things he can use as he chooses. His opening purpose there is to shoot quail, a leisure activity made possible by that property and its resources.

Atlanta’s institutions also convert money into recognition. Croker recalls giving $100,000 toward the High Museum’s new building and $5 million to Georgia Tech. When his own finances deteriorate, he briefly imagines asking his alma mater to return a million dollars, then concludes that it would refuse and leave him looking desperate. He feels obliged to attend the museum’s major event and maintain appearances. The episode turns philanthropy into a two-sided arrangement: donations support civic institutions, while also establishing the donor’s place among the people expected to give.

The same status order appears in Raymond Peepgass’s account of PlannersBanc during Croker’s prosperous years. Croker was received on the forty-ninth-floor executive level, where a $270,000 custom rug, mahogany conference tables, walnut paneling, fine food, and a view across Atlanta’s rising glass towers made his importance tangible. Peepgass contrasts such empire builders with commercial bankers, whom he regards as the more passive class. Croker and men like him, he thinks, assume that force of will and guile can persuade bankers to roll over or refinance troubled loans. The chain is thus also a hierarchy of financial power, with borrowers who build empires expecting lenders to absorb the consequences.

Public Space and the Limits of Rank

A related contrast emerges at the Piedmont Driving Club during Freaknik. Roger White recognizes the club as a citadel of Atlanta’s white establishment. Founded in 1887, it had grown from elite gatherings to display costly carriages, horses, and equipment in what is now Piedmont Park. Black people had long been admitted only in service roles; by the time of the scene, the club was seeking Black members, and Roger himself had received an overture. Outside, a crowd of young Black people and their cars fills the streets and the park, surrounding the terrace where the club’s members are gathered. The scene does not name the Great Chain of Being, but its visible arrangement of access, exclusion, and changing public presence gives the metaphor a civic counterpart.

A Hierarchy Under Pressure

The image’s force lies in the gap between the language of belonging and the material signs that secure it. Croker’s donations, estate, and privileged reception at the bank show how wealth can make a person prominent; Peepgass’s obituary anxiety shows how quickly he fears becoming forgettable. Martha’s renewed visibility and Roger’s refusal to enter the club on its terms add other forms of resistance to the same ordering. The Great Chain of Being gathers these tensions into one downward image: a social structure that presents itself as stable, yet leaves its members measuring their place by property, institutional recognition, and who will remember them.