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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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Fitzgerald’s choice of words help foreshadow a depressing tone in chapter 8 and continuing on to chapter 9 in The Great Gatsby. It specifies towards Gatsby’s lifeless body floating in the pool and moments before his death. Where Gatsby enters a “new world” (161) and people like Gatsby are “poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air”(161) . This basically summarizes Gatsby as he thought he “paid a price for living too long with a single dream”(161). To interpret this, and the paragraph before, this gives the chapter its peak of depression, where Gatsby has died.

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Fitzgerald utilizes many rhetorical strategies throughout his novel. Specific to the excerpt the rhetorical strategies metaphor and personification are found to be used to strengthen Fitzgerald’s key themes of dreams and reality. Ultimately though, the rhetorical strategies and themes contribute to creating the effect that Gatsby is truly above the average man and that Gatsby, at least to Nick, is some amazing creature that grew from his dreams. The first instance of personification to be used in the passage is in the line, “I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever: I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart” This use of personification has the effect of

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Dat Huynh IB English Literature October 9, 2017 C12 Journal 4 In the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald organizes the characters in his novel to live and recreate past memories and relationships. This is evident with Gatsby and Daisy’s past relationship and Gatsby aspiring so much for Daisy and dreaming of her to be the person she once was in the past. Fitzgerald’s constant shift of the past creates a sense of fractured reality, and a reality that is dependent on its relationship to the past.

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Unhappy Relationships Relationships are complicated. “The Great Gatsby”, where people leave each other, cheat on each other, and they lie and then they die, exemplifies this idea. Some do stay together throughout the book but in the end its not what they wanted. Fitzgeralds theme of unhappy relationships in The Great Gatsby is shped by Gatsby, Diasy, and Tom in order to convey the idea that no one ended up together happy because of everyone interfering with everyone elses relationships. Gatsby chases his dream of being with Daisy, but it was never fullfilled.

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American author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his novel, The Great Gatsby illustrates that similarly as the American Dream itself has declined into the coarse pursuit for material riches, Gatsby, as well, strives just for riches once he had become hopelessly enamored with Daisy, whose trivial, limited creative ability could consider nothing more prominent. Fitzgerald’s purpose is to capture the disillusionment Nick imagines Gatsby would see should he have realized Daisy wouldn't call. He utilizes dejected diction to depict what Gatsby's false hope would lead to when he becomes aware of his future without Daisy. Fitzgerald begins with the disillusion Nick has for Gatsby's future by describing the dreary feeling he imagines in Gatsby. He captures

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Wallowing in his despair, Gatsby laments at how the consequences of his broken dream-his obsession and fantasy of Daisy-has essentially drained the life out of his world. Fitzgerald’s use of diction and characterization help to illustrate the full devastation of Gatsby’s loss. By describing Gatsby’s hopelessness and his eventual death, Fitzgerald argues that the fundamental nature of dreams, or rather, the object of a dream, can be corruptible, demonizing, and futile. Fitzgerald starts his biography of Gatsby with the assertion that Gatsby’s romantic and joyful sentiments have been perverted by his heart-breaking rejection. By describing Gatsby’s newfound apathy, melancholy, and pessimism, Fitzgerald portrays the fragile corruptibility, and

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Gatsby got lost in that push and forgot that his desires had long since been fulfilled. “And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” (Fitzgerald 180)

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Fitzgerald uses traveling symbols to show the movement of Gatsby to obsession. As Gatsby reaches the train to leave Louisville “the track curve[s],.away from the sun” (Steinbeck 153). This shows how Gatsby moves away from Daisy Fay, the light of his life and even though he knows Daisy has left the obsession forms nonetheless. Moving away from the sun also shows how Gatsby goes into a dark headspace as he leaves Louisville. Steinbrink states, “on the train.

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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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Jay Gatsby, the protagonist in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, is trapped in a romantic haze where he is unable to see the events happening around realistically. This haze prevents Gatsby from making true connections with the objects and people that surround him. Gatsby 's wanting to recreate the past, his unrealistic dreams of Daisy, his need to connect with nature, and his desire to be rich demonstrate his being a romantic dreamer, thereby restraining him from making realistic connections with others.

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His hopeful quest for these ideals gives him a sense of honour and chivalry; however, it is the “foul dust” (4) of disillusionment and moral decay interfering with his dreams that leads to his undoing. Gatsby’s dreams are “great,” only they blind him from the cruel reality of humans’ inability to repeat the past. It is such disappointment that prompts his demise. Gatsby’s attachment to his past and desperation to attain the false notion of the American Dream compels him into an endless hurtle toward a dead end. Fitzgerald effectively highlights the fallacy of the American Dream through Gatsby’s sincere journey into the wealthy society--and eventually his traumatic decline--as he reaches out to Daisy’s ghostly heart.

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Fitzgerald was a firm believer in the American Dream not being as fantastic as many people believed it to be, and in this novel he used Jay Gatsby to demonstrate the emptiness of the rich and, in this passage especially, the faults of ‘living too high with a single dream’ (Fitzgerald, 1993, pg 103). Throughout the novel, Gatsby begins to lose the ‘enchanted objects’ (Fitzgerald, 1993, pg 60) in his life, until, in this passage, he realises that without Daisy, his life is hollow. He is surrounded by a vast amount of material objects that hold absolutely no value anymore; they are ‘material without being real’ (Fitzgerald, 1993, pg 103). But as much as anyone can say bad things about Gatsby, the one undoubtable thing is his hope, but in the final moments before his death, he loses his hope. His great ‘incorruptible’ dream has been corrupted.

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The seasons were changing from summer to fall, and on the day of his death it was said to be a warm day with yellowing trees and falling leaves. He was awaiting a phone call that came too late. So while he floated in this pool unaware that it would be his first and last time, Nick Carraway thinks, “I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass” (Fitzgerald 169).

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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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