Figurative Language In The Great Gatsby

How can a person truly move forward and towards their aspirations? Author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, attempts to teach readers just what humanity should do in order to progress in their desires through his novel. As the audience follows the whimsical and mysterious life that is Jay Gatsby, conflicts and confusion build. The novel itself is used as a cautionary tale by the author to convey lessons. Readers are warned by F. Scott Fitzgerald to move towards their dreams and not collide with others in their struggles of the past and present with his use of figurative language.

Symbolism is one of the main categories in the figurative language utilized by the author that made strong impacts on reader by forcing them to contemplate

Irony is heavily used in the situation when Gatsby takes the fall for Daisy’s hit-and-run. On the knight of Mrs. Wilson's death, Nick asks Gatsby if “Daisy [was] driving?”, to this Gatsby replies “yes… but [that] of course [he’ll] say [that he] was” the one driving (Fitzgerald 143). To this act of love, Daisy leaves Gatsby behind, forgetting all about him as he watches miserably from the distance. Even though Gatsby gave up everything for Daisy, she didn’t spare him a second glance. And in return, he got shot for a crime he didn’t commit all for his supposed ‘loved’ one who didn’t care enough to speak up when her husband made implications to Gatsby’s murderer, Mr. Wilson, that Gatsby had been the one to run over Mrs. Wilson nor even to come to his funeral. After Gatsby’s fatal misfortune comes to pass, his friend Nick finally realizes that Tom and Daisy “were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let the other people clean up the mess they had made…” (Fitzgerald 179). It is ironic that the two who are noted as some of the most thoughtless, self-centered, inhumane characters in the novel, are also the only two that smash everything apart, hurting those around them, and never pay the consequences for their words

in a less clear manner that forces readers to pay attention and reflect on his meaning behind his writing. When Nick ponders on Gatsby’s death and what he may have felt at the time, he thinks of how Gatsby is going to “A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, [drift] fortuitously about… like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees” (Fitzgerald 161). In this metaphor, Gatsby is described as heading to a new world, an unknown afterlife, where his spirit will continue chasing his dreams, forever unable to reach them as he drifts aimlessly for eternity. Fitzgerald also ends the book with a metaphor of how “...to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning ― So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald 180). The metaphor depicts humans as boats, trying to push against the currents that sway their movements, beating into each other, never allowing any advance towards the wishes a person strives to accomplish. As the waves of currents and problems come crashing on each individual and they try to struggle against one another, nothing can move forward; a boat can try to trudge through, but it may also sink, for sometimes it’s the challenging wave is too high and the boat isn’t strong enough to overcome