Rhetorical Devices

Joe Kennedy

AP Language

Sanchez

12 January 2012

Rhetorical Strategies Response

·      Hyperbole: “but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away” (6).

·      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” (6).

·      Simile: “A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted-wedding cake of the ceiling” (8).

·      Onomatopoeia: “I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains” (8).

In the novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses an abundance of rhetorical strategies and vivid imagery to convey his positive yet honest tone as well as to describe characters and surroundings for the reader to interpret. In chapter one, Fitzgerald describes the town of West Egg and the people who live there, and with his descriptive language and input of rhetorical devices, he reveals his positive tone. The author uses playful imagery and asserts his main character and narrator, Nick Carraway, as an easy-going, non-judgmental protagonist. Yet, Nick can still see the good and evil in people, although he truly wants to look at every situation as one where the glass is half full.