Rhetorical Strategies

• Personification: “The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its sun” (6).
• 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).
• Repetition: “This is the valley of the ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into the 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).
• Metaphor: “The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain” (85).

In his novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses various rhetorical strategies to go above and beyond to portray his unique style of writing. He also uses these strategies to help him make the reader see certain things in a new light and picture certain situations the way he wants them to see it. As seen in this vivid simile above, Fitzgerald compares the curtains to pale flags, which aids him to put forth that they are plain and also goes on comparing the ceiling to a frosted wedding cake, giving the image of a jagged and uneven ceiling. Through the repetition of ashes, when describing the road that is halfway between West Egg and New York, it permits for an emphasis on the fact that it is a dark and polluted place and causes for a more lucid illustration of this sinister place for the reader to be able to imagine. He also uses strategies like personification and metaphor to put a more atypical way of describing or articulate something like in the examples above.