The Great Gatsby Rhetorical Analysis

Boats Against the Current

In the final lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, there is a stylistic change in the writing, one that is meant not only to echo Jay Gatsby’s experience throughout the book, but also to meld those experiences into that of Fitzgerald’s readers. By doing so, readers are able to relate to and understand why Gatsby continued to chase after the unattainable, one of the most human undertakings that exist. Fitzgerald uses pronoun shifts, changes his general sentence structure, and includes different forms of punctuation to alter the conventional perspectives of The Great Gatsby and to divert readers’ attention to not only Gatsby’s endeavors but also to their own.

Throughout the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald eloquently describes the human desire to achieve something essentially unattainable. Nick Carraway, narrator of The Great Gatsby, bases his story off of the impossible, a relationship involving Jay Gatsby, the story’s protagonists, and Daisy Buchanan, a selfish and rich girl who Gatsby once was, and is still, in love with. At the beginning of the novel, when Nick first sees Gatsby, he noticed

These dashes represent abrupt endings, like when Daisy rejected Gatsby for the last time. In the statement “it eluded us then, but that’s no matter --” F. Scott Fitzgerald is pointing out how, even when Gatsby was rejected by Daisy the first time, he was not defeated, which, at the time, was “no matter--” until Daisy abandoned him. (180). Unlike the dashes, the ellipsis represents continuation, but of what, one is not supposed to know. Gatsby did not know what would happen when he “stretched his arms father…” as we do not know what will happen if we do so. Fitzgerald used this punctuation to emphasize the unknown, not to leave us with annoyance, but rather with anticipation of what’s to