The Westing Game Wealth Quotes

Just in case we readers weren't impressed enough with that figure, Raskin has Turtle repeat it to us, and add the emphasis of "Wow!" Two hundred million dollars is still a ton of money in the twenty-first century; can you imagine how much it would have been worth in 1978?

When you consider how much money that is, the idea of having a will that's based on a game with all these moving parts, rather than an airtight legal document that clearly states who gets what is almost foolish. It's too much money for fooling around with.

Knowing Grace, she'd probably figure out a way to convince herself of this without remembering family gossip. As we find out later, though, Grace isn't wrong – she really is related to Sam Westing. Technically, perhaps, she should end up as the correct heir, since she's the closest living blood relative (that we know of). Her idea here is a funny mixture of conceit and secret righteousness.

This is a key part of the will, and also a weird one. What does $10,000 have to do with becoming the winner of the game? It's kind of like getting all the accessories for Monopoly and then switching to Clue. With the exception of Turtle and Flora, none of the teams use their money to help themselves within the game – all that money goes to other life stuff. You know what's kind of weird, too? We never really hear about what Angela and Sydelle do with their money. What do you think it could be?

This tells us a lot about Jake and Grace's relationship with each other, as well as their individual relationships with money. Jake's a gambler, so $5,000 would come in super-handy when he gets into tight spots. But as much as he feels upset about losing the money, he's not willing to tell Grace about it. He's disturbed by how Grace seems more upset by him not getting that $5,000 than she is about Westing dying (which also tells us about how Grace feels about money).

In a way, Turtle's decision that the winning player will be the one who wins the most money in the stock market is no more of a misreading than the other players' idea that whoever finds the murderer will be the winner. They're all based on ideas from the will, and they're all wrong. At least Turtle comes out of it with an extra thousand bucks.

The judge (like Theo) is almost too good to be true. She's the best tipper. Technically, this phrasing also makes her sound even more generous than she is. Each pair gets ten thousand to divide between themselves, and most of the other teams split it fifty/fifty. So the judge really only had $5,000 to give Sandy. It's still really generous, but it's actually about equal to Theo giving his share to his parents.

We think this calls for an LOL. It's also a great example of irony. Participating in a contest to win hundreds of millions of dollars is not, and will never be, normal. So "normal" in this context doesn't mean what we consider "normal"; instead, it means that backbiting, spying, and generally acting suspicious has come to stand for typical, expected behavior. And that's all because of the money.

Doug is one of the few players who are not interested in playing the game. We can applaud his determination to make something of himself on his own terms, working with his innate abilities to create a profitable career – instead of relying on other people's money, he's working on paying his own way. Snarkily speaking, though, Doug's just not that good at or interested in strategy.

Once we find out that Sandy's really Sam Westing, this line takes on a much deeper meaning. Judge Ford's upset that she owes Westing a debt for her education, and she's never going to pay it back. She worries that Westing helped her out so he'd have a judge on his payroll. It seems here like Sandy is just trying to calm her down. But as Westing, this could be the full and only reason why he helped the judge in the first place – because she was "smart and needy," and he had the means to help her. He gave her the opportunity, but she's giving him too much credit.

Judge Ford didn't become a legal arbitrator for no reason – she really is a good candidate for being a judge. Here, we see her moral code of being fair and equitable applied to her real life situations, just as she probably applies it in the courtroom. Her sense of fairness and justice, of what's right, makes her uneasy about accepting an education and not giving back anything in return. When she becomes Chris's benefactor, she's paying Westing back in the best possible way, carrying on his tradition of mentoring young people, and turning the bitterness she feels at having this unpaid debt into the good deed of enabling education.