The Great Gatsby Sonnet 1 Literary Devices

Within the constraints of Victorian England, Browning’s sonnet sequence explores the nature of love and its transformative powers. The sonnet’s poetic form conveys tension with the confined structure revealing an evolving dynamic about intense love rousing from disbelief to a mutual understanding. Originally in Sonnet 1, she records a melancholic despondent voice through the oxymoronic ‘sweet, sad years’ prolonged by the complex syntax. She appropriates the gothic conventions and mythic allusion by describing how a ‘mystic shape’ behind her pulled ‘her backwards by the hair’. The surprising proclamation, ‘Guess who holds thee?’ with capitalisation of the answer ‘Love’ connotes its power. By Sonnet 21, Idyllic seasonal imagery signals her spiritual

Tempered by post-WW1 detachment and cynicism, 1920s America pursuits of pleasure make idealistic love precarious as the ‘foul dust’ ruins dreams. Fitzgerald employs the ideals of Courtly Love, however it is corrupted by material amoral values evident in the relationship between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. The religious allusion, ‘he knew that when he kissed the girl….At his lips touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete’ is indicative of Gatsby’s love of the perception/idea of Daisy. Gatsby’s quest of the ‘grail’ is larger than Daisy as the innocence of Gatsby’s vision coupled with his exceptional vitality and capacity to hope makes him ‘great’ amongst the moral decay as the deathly imagery suggests ‘only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible’. Ironically, Gatsby’s adolescent naivety, untroubled by doubt, fails to adjust to the realities of a harsh world run by cruel and self-absorbed people like Tom and Daisy. Nick, as the narrative voice, tries to imagine Gatsby has some critical understanding of the futility of his dream to recapture the past. This is evident in the falling metaphor, ‘There must have been moments even that afternoon when

Thus evoking a pessimistic portrayal of the materialistic culture in disarray and the disintegration of the ‘American Dream’. Nick is both attracted yet repulsed by what he sees with Fitzgerald portraying him as needing restraint and sense of order among the moral anarchy through simile and mechanical metaphor that he maintained ‘interior rules that act as brakes on my desires’. Nick finally passes judgement, questioning the certainties of loyalty and morality, asserting, ‘They’re a rotten crowd’ with a sense of disillusionment, ‘I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.’ Fitzgerald exposes the façade of the glamorous Jazz Age by satirically amplifying the moral emptiness and hypocrisy underneath. Death of religion is seen through the ironic motif of sightless eyes of Dr T J Eckleburg, the materialistic advert whose salient image of failure with the fading billboard is watching over the lost values of the American Dream. The American Dream is the possibilities of life and Gatsby’s struggle is part of cultural tradition, the realisation of destiny through self-discipline and initiative. Fitzgerald’s heroic representation of Gatsby ‘Mr Nobody from Nowhere’ embodies the myth of the self-made man. Nick confesses, ‘there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the possibilities of life’.