A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Great Gatsby

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Author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his novel, The Great Gatsby, recounts the story of two love-struck people through another character called Nick. Fitzgerald’s purpose is to show how different characters change throughout the story by using many rhetorical elements like descriptive imagery, the choice of strong diction, and metaphors/similes. The author focuses on the characterization of three main characters which are Gatsby, Daisy, and Nick because they are seemingly connected. These characterizations relate back to the themes of achieving the American Dream that is to be rich and powerful but still have love and a family to come home to every night. Even though many of the characters have changed and evolved throughout the story, some of them …show more content…

He believes that if he can get rich enough that Daisy will leave Tom for him which shows how little he thinks of Daisy, if he thinks that she will only get back together with him if he has money. The parties for Gatsby are more about putting on a good public display. Jay Gatsby is very concerned with his outward appearance, particularly when Daisy Buchanan is the one whose attention he has caught. For Gatsby to throw extravagant parties every day for a whole summer shows that he is a hopeful person even though he had no indication that Daisy will someday show up at his party, but maybe too hopeful of a person. As the plot disentangles, Fitzgerald exposes Gatsby 's dark roots, including his partygoers ' assumptions that he killed a man or is actually a German spy from the Third Reich, and the fact that he can never get the story regarding how he climbed to prosperity, straight. His rather indeterminate and shady manner of "business" with Meyer Wolfshiem and inability to explicitly explain, even to Nick, what trade he is in, demonstrates that his crisp, rich image is not what he says it is. The haze of the glorification of money hides this suspicious background, which is why Gatsby is so great in the beginning of the book, but falls utterly hard by the