Rhetorical Strategies and other tasty bits of literary gold.

Rhetorical Strategies in The Great Gatsby
• Simile: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away” (2).
• Imagery: “Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face” (11).
• Onomatopoeia: “Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at the table” (15).
• Parallelism: “The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms” (17).
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby follows the life of Nick Carraway, a newcomer to West Egg, Long Island. He befriends millionaire Jay Gatsby and lives a socialite lifestyle as one of Gatsby’s companions. In a simile comparing Gatsby to an intricate machine, Fitzgerald captures the culture and time of the Jazz age, which starts after World War I. The increasing technological advances of the era are shown through this, which defines Fitzgerald style as heavily influenced by the society around him. A source of imagery describes Miss Baker with impeccable detail, her beauty juxtaposed with the anguish she has. An example of onomatopoeia illustrates the clothing both Tom and Daisy were wearing, a flutter and crunch providing sound. A use of parallelism shows the difference light can have on shadowing, luminescent yet dull simultaneously. These examples exhibit Fitzgerald style as one that is heavily 1920’s.