Fitzgerald demonstrates several common ideas and devices throughout the novel. The passages which describe the characteristics or views of Tom, Daisy and Nick have several rhetorical devices in common. The three rhetorical devices or ideas that are repeated or common in these passages are descriptive details about people or places, oxymorons, and the character's view of the world or what is most important to them.
In the first passage about Tom, Fitzgerald pays careful attention to describe Tom so well that the reader can almost see him walking in the room. "...sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth ... his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body -- he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing,..." (pg 7) The author carefully describes Tom to help the reader visualize him entering the room in his riding clothes. In the next passage Fitzgerald describes Daisy's voice using many light, happy, and descriptive words.
English: Bird's eye panorama of Manhattan & New Yo...
Daisy
A 20 segment panoramic image of the New York Midto..."... in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again." (pg 9) Fitzgerald compares Daisy's voice to notes on an instrument which makes the reader hear a melodic, bright, pretty voice. The final passage describes Nick's view of New York. Fitzgerald describes Nick on a New York street, like Fifth Avenue, watching all the people pass by and dreaming that he enters the lives of some of the beautiful women he passes by. "I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women ... and imagine that ... I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove." (pg 57) Nick also imagines following these women...