Gatsby Blog: Rhetorical Strategies

Great Gatsby: Rhetorical Strategies

·         Hyperbole: “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).

·         Simile/alliteration/imagery: “This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” (23).

·         Personification: “It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey” (48)

In the novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald employs a variety of rhetorical strategies in his intricate writing style to allow him to draw in outside information and make fantastic connections. While describing Mr. Gatsby, “If personality…miles away” (2) — Fitzgerald -- through the words of his narrator Nick Carraway, uses a hyperbole to exaggerate certain characteristics of Mr. Gastby. By enhancing his personality with long prose, Carraway is able to draw a smilingly random comparison between Gatsby and a seismograph, but one that is none the less effective in describing him. As Fitzgerald pours out another complex sentence riddled with alliteration, imagery, and a simile, “This is a valley of ashes--….powdery air” (23), a connection is drawn between an image formed of the desolation of some of the society in the 1920’s and the desolation of the upcoming situation Carraway has unknowingly gotten himself into. Further enhancing his complicated writing style, Fitzgerald uses personification to transform an ordinary sentence into one that goes into the deeper meaning of a smile, “It understood…you hoped to convey” (48) and acts as an outlet for expressing more of Gatsby’s personality. Fitzgerald’s writing style of complex sentences with many connections is developed through the use of rhetorical strategies.