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Literary Devices Used In The Great Gatsby

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The idea of holding relentlessly onto memories and hoping to retrieve the past is ironically portrayed in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s modernist novel The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope” is usually depicted in a positive light by narrator Nick Carraway (2). However, in a passage in Chapter 8 (152-3), a more dim light is cast upon his dream, foreshadowing Gatsby’s downfall in his pursuit of it. Gatsby has breakfast with Nick and denies the fact that Daisy has ever loved Tom and tells Nick the story of him visiting Daisy’s former hometown Louisville, during Tom and Daisy’s honeymoon. The city of Louisville and its parts are the major symbols of this passage. As every little section is connected with a certain remembrance, …show more content…

This anecdote is written in the form of a flashback, allowing the reader to gain further insight on the dreamer’s complex background. Absence and disappearing are main motifs, as Fitzgerald uses words and phrases such as “gone”, “leaving”, “slid away”, “moved by”, “going away”, “sank”, “vanishing” and “lost” (152-3). These dismal choices reflect Gatsby’s unwillingness to give up and how empty his heart would be if he gives up this dream. He is so afraid of losing this part of his life that he “stretched out his hand...to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him” as if he could keep on pretending things are the way they were (153). Fitzgerald uses the literal meaning of the train “going by too fast" to describe the passing time and criticizes Gatsby's obsession with staying in the past by claiming he has “blurred eyes” (153). Also, the “vanishing city” is physically vanishing as the train travels away, along with the memories and past life within the city vanishing from Gatsby’s mind (153). Fitzgerald’s sorrowful passage causes readers to sympathize with Gatsby’s love that was lost to another man, replacing his once gleeful hope with utter hopelessness as “he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever”

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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.

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In the book, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the speaker, Nick, describe many complex attitudes towards hope by showing the complexity of Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship to express this theme. Nick uses literary devices such as similes, metaphors, and juxtaposition to portray to the audience how Gatsby and Daisy’s love may seem tangible to them, but in reality, they are worlds apart. Nick uses similes to have the audience understand that Gatsby and Daisy are constantly hoping for a better life, and that utopian life to them is to be together. “It had seemed as close as a star to the moon”(Fitzgerald 94).

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