Rhetorical Devices In The Great Gatsby

After the suffering of World War I in the 1920s, many of the upper class Americans focused on filling their lives with endless joy and concentrating their energies on their own pleasure and comfort to forget about wartime memories. The 1920s era was were money had become the foundation of society due to the American dream, where everyone left behind their horrible past and centralized on becoming wealthy and being the most superlative. As a result, in The Great Gatsby through many rhetorical devices, Fitzgerald uses Nick Carraway as his persona in order to portray that money became too powerful and people became extremely selfish and greedy in the 1920s. For instance, through diction, Carraway adequately describes his disgust of the East in

For instance, Mr. Carraway uses quotation marks on the word, nice, in order to create emphasis on the fact that Gatsby, five years ago, thought that Daisy was very charming. However, in reality, Gatsby did not realize that the reason Daisy was charming to him was because of her “beautiful house” and “rich life” that “amazed him” (154 Fitzgerald). Gatsby “let [Daisy] believe that he was from much the same stratum” as her when in reality he had “no such facilities” (155 Fitzgerald). Therefore, when Gatsby went to war, Daisy betrayed him for Mr. Buchanan, because he had the wealth Daisy was actually seeking. The quotation marks around nice were used in order to foreshadow that Daisy was not who Gatsby thought she was. Daisy only cared about Gatsby because she thought he had the wealth she searched for. However, even when Gatsby bootlegged alcohol to become wealthy, Daisy still betrayed Gatsby, because Mr. Buchanan inherited his money meaning his wealth is much more stable, which, again, displays that Daisy left Gatsby due to her selfish desires. Also, when Gatsby was with Daisy five years ago, he described her as “gleaming like silver” (156 Fitzgerald). This is another indication that Gatsby never related to Daisy’s persona. He let her represent the wealth that he had always hoped to be part of as a child from a poor background. So, when he planned to get Daisy back, she wanted an individual who had a stable and wealthy history like Mr.