Fitzgerald's diction, filtered through his characters, implies an underlying social commentary on the characters' humanity. When Daisy cries, "'It makes me sad because I've never seen such–such beautiful shirts before'" (92), the author is playing off both the character's frailty and her codependence for happiness on wealth and materialism. Further, when Gatsby is trying to impress Nick by showing him around the house, he remarks, "'I see you're looking at my cuff buttons,'" to which Nick narrates that he "hadn't been looking at them, but [he] did now" (72). The backwards way that Jay gets the narrator to see what he wants him to see suggests, again, that a high value is placed on possessions in their society, and creates a superficial and almost hypocritical tone.
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald occasionally goes off on a seemingly unnecessary tangent to emphasize a point about a character, or the narrator's opinion thereof. When Gatsby claims that he was given a decoration by "little Montenegro" (66), Nick narrates that "[Jay] lifted up the words and nodded at them with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciate fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart" (66). This digression from the story line reveals Nick's simultaneous admiration of, jealousy of, and contempt for Gatsby. The ambiguity of his impression is further proven by his saying that his "incredulity was submerged in fascination now" (66). The inclusion of such diction lends comprehensiveness to the characters and develops them as dynamic (or static, depending), whilst incorporating the author's underlying dramatic tone, themes and motifs.
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