Fitzgerald's Use of Language in The Great Gatsby Essay

The Great Gatsby has been around for ages; it is a story of a young man in the 1920’s who is thrown into a new world made up of the new and the old rich. He is confused by the way these people act and in the end cannot stay another minute in this strange, insensitive, materialistic world. The author, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses many techniques to help the reader understand how Nick Carraway (the narrator) is feeling throughout the story. In the book The Great Gatsby, the author F. Scott Fitzgerald uses effective language to make his writing successful. He uses the techniques of imagery and irony to display this message.

“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart,” was said by Maya Angelou. Many authors strive to write books that have a purpose, including the author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The author strives to display multiple purposes to readers through strong, sophisticated writing. The purposes Fitzgerald shows in The Great Gatsby include that substance in relationships matters, the truth is important, and that actions have consequences. Fitzgerald executes the purposes successfully by using rhetorical choices such as irony, homilies, simple dialogue, similes, and syntax

Qualities like absolute moral perfection are even less attainable than world peace, and they have no place in quality literature. No one relates to the main character that never lets his emotions get the better of him once in a while. Truly powerful characters require at least some degree of moral ambiguity. Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby engages in illegal liquor sales and business with the man who rigged the World Series, which combine with his purest of intentions and virtually universal kindness to create some definitely ambiguous morals. Due to that ambiguity, Gatsby’s character remains imperfect and one whom readers can entirely relate to, while promoting the prominent theme in the novel of the American Dream’s

When Fitzgerald uses the color white in The Great Gatsby it represents innocence and purity, but, ironically, every subject associated with the color white is the opposite of innocent and pure. When the reader is introduced to Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker “They were both wearing white” (Fitzgerald 8). They dress for people to look at them as “white” and honest people. Later in the story Fitzgerald presents that they are both having affairs and lie in many aspects of their lives. Jordan Baker, a professional golfer, lies during her first golf match and no one questions it because of her social status. Tom Buchanan takes Nick Carraway to a street with “a long white cake of apartment houses” where they drink, party, and Tom has an affair (28). These white apartments are the setting of much sinful and impure behavior. White shows much hypocrisy through The Great Gatsby because Fitzgerald uses irony whenever it is used.

1. We see all the action of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of one character whose

Daisy, Tom’s wife and the object of Gatsby’s romantic quest, for example, possesses a voice “full of money,” (144) which blatantly associates her character with wealth. Fitzgerald makes Daisy seem desirable, but never describes her physical features, which is odd considering she is the force behind the profound obsession of Jay Gatsby. Perhaps Fitzgerald chooses to ignore Daisy’s physical description to purposefully display her as a bare character. In essence, he dehumanizes her to better reveal her shallowness. One of the few times a physical description of Daisy appears comes in conjunction with Miss Baker, another character under the spell of wealth, when Nick comments on their white dresses with “their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire” (17). With

In literature, authors commonly utilize diction as a prominent technique. Diction is the choice of words, or style within a novel. Fitzgerald uses diction to enhance his theme: “the past can not be repeated”. Gatsby references Daisy as “she” and “despairingly” expresses that “she doesn’t understand” (1). The denotation of despair is “showing the loss of all hope”, which represents a negative connotation, similar to the word “sad”. Because Gatsby is referencing his longing for the past with the word “despairingly”, the reader can infer that he is depressed that he cannot repeat the past, which is the theme of The Great Gatsby. After Nick states that “you can’t repeat the past”, Gatsby responds in denial (4-5). His response to Nick was described as “incredulously” (5). This word is denoted as “a manner communicating disbelief, even when valid support is presented”. Thus, Nick knows that the theme is true, yet Gatsby is in denial of it. The author creates this conflict, which the entire novel is centered around. The diction decisions of F Scott Fitzgerald enhance the reader’s comprehension of the connection between Gatsby, and the overarching theme of The Great Gatsby.

When Jordan and Nick are driving back to East Egg, they almost run into a pedestrian, and while Nick questions about Jordan’s ability as a driver, she obnoxiously asserts that it takes two people to cause a mistake. “You’re a rotten driver!” Nick protests, “They’ll keep out of my way, I hope I Never will (be careful), I hate careless people. That’s why I like you,” She answers. In this scene, Jordan’s response reflects her characters as cold and selfish; In addition, she sets an example of “old money” perceiving themselves to be more superior than lower-classes, and they can simply solve the problems with money without any consequences. The scene reveals the loss of humanity in that era that individuals are isolated by money, which prevents them from seeing what really matters. Similarly, Tom Buchanan shows his perspective about life as a trivial thing when Nick tells him that Gatsby's death. Tom exclaims “And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering---when I give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on their sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby.” In my opinion, Fitzgerald uses simile and irony to depict Tom Buchanan as a cruel person that the loss of his apartment is more significant than Gatsby’s sacrifice; Tom's words expose the corruption of morals and humanity in that age. people think they are preserving the real value,

In the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, many of the characters live in an illusory world and only some can see past this. In the novel, West Egg and its residents represent the newly rich, while East Egg represents the old aristocracy. Gatsby seeking the past, Daisy is obsessed with material things, Myrtle wanting Tom to escape her poverty, George believing that T.J. Eckleburg is God, and Tom believing he is untouchable because of his power and wealth are all examples of the illusion v. reality struggle in the novel and Nick, the only character aware of reality, witnesses the fall of all the characters around him to their delusions.

F Scott Fitzgerald used a powerful choice of words for his book "The Great Gatsby."

The world that Nick recounts is full of idealizations. When Nick first encounters Jordan and Daisy, “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house” (8). The women here sound like something out of a fairy tale. They come off as fantastical but are not as good of people as they may seem. Their false presentation brings up the lies behind everyone’s presentation. Gatsby, as well, is not what he presents himself as. He is said to be an “Oxford man” but only visited Oxford with Dan Cody. The façades are a part of society’s attempt to be something it is not and to present itself as something better than it is. The truth is that they are all, in their own ways, like Tom and Daisy

Tom never does anything without doing it to the fullest, good or bad. Tom has an overall extremely short temper, assertive,confident and aggressive nature. Tom’s wild, emotional, and uncaring attitude end up getting three people killed. Tom in the end is ultimately concerned with himself and his lavished ,intense, and high paced

“He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. 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 a life.” (48) This quote introduced in chapter 3, and produced by Nick is a prime example of Fitzgerald's use of descriptive writing presented in his book The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald's sensory - oriented writing style allows the reader to feel as if they are a character in the story, by describing sight, smell, taste, feeling, and sound. Fitzgerald's complex style of writing literally makes the words jump off the page and become realistic; just with the short excerpt presented earlier Fitzgerald allows the reader to mentally preview what it would be like to witness a smile as such from Jay Gatsby. Traditionally while a reader analyzes the story the lexicon provides help; in Fitzgerald's novel his complex diction does much more including creating positive and negative connotations and an atmosphere.

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by a renowned American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The magnificent tale is told through the eyes of Nick Carraway and it is through his perceptions of characters that influence our thoughts of the entire story. Fitzgerald allows Nick to see both worlds and sides of conflict, as he is the moral center of the book. Even though the protagonist can be considered as an unreliable author, readers tend to agree with his sincere perceptions distinguishing between right and wrong, good people and bad people, truths and lies and reality. However, this quality does not interrupt the fact that he is an unreliable author. Revolving around the criticism of the ‘American dream’, Fitzgerald clearly uses Nick Carraway

Nicks first sees Gatsby reaching towards the mysterious green light, which he later realizes is the light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He calls himself an Oxford man, and speaks with a visible fake English accent. Gatsby befriends his neighbor Nick with the sole purpose of using him in order to get closer to daisy. With Nick and Jordan’s help, the two are reunited on a rainy afternoon in Nick’s house. Blindly in love, Gatsby acts like a foolish little boy, knocking down Nick’s clock. The long awaited reunion is later moved to Gatsby’s mansion. There he displays his wealth to Daisy. When he exhibits his imported shirts “suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily” (98). Daisy’s tears are not because the shirts were beautiful; her tears signify her obsession for wealth and money, which is all she cares about.