The Great Gatsby Rhetorical Analysis

In a game of telephone players could start off with the phrase “when you give a mouse a cookie” and end with “once i had a pet snookie.” This happens because of the different perspectives that people interpret what they’re hearing through. This same kind of misinformation effect happens a lot in stories told by narrators. Take The Great Gatsby for instance, The Great Gatsby is one of the most well-known first person novels in history. In the story, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals the theme that one cannot repeat the past, conveying the narrator's biased perspective through tone and symbolism.
Nick Carrawys narration creates the many tones throughout the entire book and plays a large role in the portrayal of the theme. This is

This tone is created purely through the way that Nick feels about Tom which is biased because he much prefers Gatsby. Readers can tell that the narrator thinks this way because of the way Fitzgerald describes Tom with words like “prig” and Gatsby with words like “gorgeous.” The tone is created more through the fact that Nick says he “was tempted to laugh.” All of this works to develop the theme that one cannot repeat the past through the contrast of the tone of the stories from the past about Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship and the tone of scenes like this where Gatsby’s dream of living out a magical life with Daisy falls short. In all the stories about Gatsby’s past with Daisy, Fitzgerald creates a romantic, happy, bright tone. This is most prevalent in the quote, “The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at some time, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby,” (Fitzgerald 75). This is from a part of the book told by Nick through Jordan Baker’s perspective. In this passage readers can clearly see the joy and love of the scene. The tone of the passage is created by the way that Jordan describes the way Gatsby looked at Daisy as well as the fact that Jordan thought the moment was so romantic that she remembered it for years. The only real flaw in narration here is that it’s difficult to trust what one

Many of the character’s are created purely through Nick’s opinion of them and therefore that bias plays a huge role in how readers perceive the theme of the story. If Fitzgerald didn’t use such blatant bias in Nick’s characterization of the main characters like Gatsby and Daisy it would be very difficult to understand the true importance of the idea that the past can’t be repeated. A prime example of this characterization is when Nick first describes Gatsby, ”Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” (Fitzgerald 2). Because of the fact that this is the first information readers hear about Gatsby it becomes the basis for their opinion of him that the rest of the book will build around. This means that readers' opinions of Gatsby are built on Nick’s opinion of him because of how severely Nick shows whether or not he likes the characters. This has an effect on the theme because it is centered around Gatsby’s dream so readers' opinion of him is very important in their perception of the theme. Furthermore, this idea is proven in the article “Stylistic