Rhetorical Strategies

·         Simile: “then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk” (14)

·         Alliteration: “His wife was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible” (30)

·         Colloquial: “Want to go with me, old sport?” (47)

·         Allegory: “It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor” (48)

·         Anecdote: “One October day in nineteen-seventeen——(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)” (74)

·         Metaphor: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (180)

Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, uses many different rhetorical strategies throughout his work in order to portray each character’s traits. The simile at the top of the list is describing Nick Carraway’s loving view of Jordan Baker’s features. Nick is a very stable and reliable person from the beginning till the end of the novel, which makes him a great narrator because one will always know that the information being given is true; he is not very interested in material things like his friend Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald uses an allegory describing Mr. Gatsby’s smile and how any person can relate to his smile so it is the perfect way to get whatever he wants, and Gatsby has an amazing knack for setting goals and eventually achieving the things that he desires. The colloquial “old sport” is used by Gatsby throughout the whole story to try and make everyone feel like they are his friend and that he is just an average man, for example when Jay and Nick first meet, Nick has absolutely no idea that the man he is speaking with is in fact The Great Gatsby. The metaphor applied as the last line of the novel compares all humans to boats, and says that we are all beating against the current trying to move forward with our lives but hopelessly being pushed backwards into the past; this truly exhibits the course of Gatsby’s life. He is beating against the current while making money illegally for a chance to be able to impress Daisy and win her back, and all the while, he wishes to go back to the past when they were just two lovers without a care in the world. This ultimately results in his death, if he could only move on with his life and get over Daisy then he would be leading a different life entirely and not this unhealthy lifestyle he has developed that revolves around her and her alone. Through Fitzgerald's use of these rhetorical strategies, he is able to make each individual in his story very lifelike with their own personalities and ways of thinking in different situations.