· Simile: “A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea”(8).
· Alliteration: “A breeze blew through the room…”(8).
· Metaphor: “This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills…”(23).
· Imagery: “The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck”(27).
· Polysyndeton: “By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums”(40).
· Oxymoron: “…the unreality of reality…”(99).
In the novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, many rhetorical strategies are used to convey the author’s style. The simile listed above emphasizes the way that Fitzgerald is fond of creating an image with a limited amount of words. This simile also shows that the house that Nick Carraway is in has the windows open when there is clearly a storm approaching. The reader can infer there is a storm coming because the curtains in the room are compared to flags, which only wave in strong winds. The metaphor, also stated above, relates the soil of a valley, to ashes on the ground as well as provides a vivid source of imagery. Both of these rhetorical strategies help to reveal Fitzgerald’s descriptive style of writing in that they both contain imagery.
When you describe Fitzgerald’s utilization of rhetorical strategies as a means to create vivid imagery, it reminds me much of my own analysis in regards to his decorated language. Incessantly throughout the novel, the author is painting the aura of the Roaring Twenties; he does this in multiple ways. His use of polysyndetons, similes, imagery, and oxymorons are only a handful of his stylistic strategies that he employs to accurately represent not only his descriptive style but also the energy of an epoch that was crazed by money and passion and well as chaos and corruption. Like you disclosed, Fitzgerald has what seems to be an affinity for inventing descriptions that are convoluted and amplified by his clever use of rhetorical devices.
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