• Analogy: "a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing" (99).
• Paradox: "Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire to meet her–but I did" (24).
• Polysyndeton: "Men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars" (39).
• Repetition: "'Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it'" (11).
• Rhetorical question: "'What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?' cried Daisy, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?'" (118).*
• Simile: "[She was] completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall" (8).
• Zeugma: "Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations" (58).
Perhaps the most recurrent theme in The Great Gatsby is the material opulence of the idea of the American dream in contrast with the reality of the inner emptiness it brings about. Fitzgerald, known as one of the main proponents of this idea of DISILLUSIONMENT, makes poignant note of it through his exceptional use of imagery, diction (see blog entry #2), and other rhetorical strategies cleverly intertwined into the running story. The sometimes peculiar comparisons between two seemingly-unrelated objects, or an obscure reference to Jay Gatsby as "Trimalchio" (113) or coming to "the point of believing everything and nothing about him," (101), all contribute to the beautiful language and author's voice. Fitzgerald's well-reknowned style, seen also in his first novel This Side of Paradise and his later work The Beautiful and the Damned, is one of social commentary on the decadence of the upper-class American, who in the '50s was without the necessity to work and was with the necessity to fit in and was ultimately having a hard time discerning the real purpose of life. The Great Gatsby, narrated (sometimes unreliably) by Nick Carraway, shows the portraits of two men: the aforementioned, who wants to be the stereotypical "'well-rounded man'" (4), and Gatsby, who strives to be the old-money type, and both of whom drift "here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together" (6). Furthermore, when Tom Buchanan is described as "one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savors of anticlimax" (6), Fitzgerald is clearly portraying an undesirable viewpoint of the so-called "American dream," while still implying that the characters are confused and unawares of the larger picture. Fitzgerald incorporates his message on multiple levels: through his subtle hinting, his blunt declarations, his imagery and his contrasting, and, more simply, the affectation of his extensive lexicon (and simultaneous, impressive use of it) on the reader.
