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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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“The orgastic future [...] year by year recedes before us” and the past consumes us with its “moments of hope and promise and wonder” (Fitzgerald 180, Parr 76). To be human is to be unfulfilled, always wanting more, but such aspirations often prevent one from living in the present. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, an obsession with the past consumes the lives of many of those living in an “universe of ineffable gaudiness” (Fitzgerald 99). Using a motif of water, Fitzgerald traces Jay Gatsby’s relationship with the past, to reveal that those who attempt to escape the past will remain there should they mistake it for the future. In the short term, they often recognize and attempt to overcome the shortcomings of their own

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