Great Gatsby Figurative Language

Striving to improve one’s standing often comes with a need to reject, or forget the past. Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby show the difficulty of escaping one’s past. Pip begins life in a working-class forge outside of London, while Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s protagonist, grew up in North Dakota, away from the riches of New York. Each is transformed by money and education, and escaping their past loves and connections comes at a cost. Using contrast between lower and upper classes, figurative language, and intertextual references, authors also show how misconceptions arise from past experiences, and how characters eventually reconcile with the less-than-ideal reality of their past.

Pip and James Gatz both

For Gatsby, this starts with his admission that he only attended Oxford for “five months”. Tom then “glanced around to see if [the other characters] mirrored his disbelief”, showing a significant change in Gatsby. Pip’s realisation begins when Magwitch is revealed as his benefactor. He slowly becomes grateful, gaining gratitude and empathy for Magwitch, and is “full of fears” for his benefactor’s safety. Magwitch describes him as “Faithful”, in contrast to the ungrateful attitude Pip showed earlier. In organising Gatsby’s funeral, Carraway reveals his hidden path, discovering, that Wolfsheim is not willing to “get mixed up in this thing now”. This suggests that many of Gatsby’s rich ‘friends’, the people who have built up his image, merely saw commercial opportunity. Carraway’s “scornful solidarity between me and Gatsby against them all” makes a direct comparison between the rich of New York and the protagonist, showing that their connection was only an illusion. Gatsby’s father, a symbol of the past, ‘catches up with him’, travelling from “a small town in Minnesota” to see his body, and his aspirations, finally buried. Similarly, “Dear old” Joe’s care of Pip during sickness also shows a return to the past, alluding to The Prodigal Son. Pip asks for forgiveness through prayer, and Joe’s reply that “God knows as I forgive you” strengthens the extended metaphor which compares the “gentle Christian man” to God. Gatsby’s final act of love, “clutching at some last hope” and refusing to leave Daisy, leads to his murder. After Daisy, Wilson, and Gatsby’s deaths, “the holocaust was complete”, showing the ultimate failure to escape the past. Dickens concludes his novel with a metaphor, using the morning mists, “risen long ago” and the “rising” evening mists to signify Pip’s past and future. By juxtaposing his