What literary devices are used in the opening paragraphs of chapters 3 and 6 in The Great Gatsby?

In addition to the natural imagery of Chapter Six of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, there is much color imagery, imagery that prevails throughout the course of the novel.  

For instance, during the chronicle of Gatsby's history, Gatsby is described as having in his youth as a clam digger, a "brown, hardening body [who] lived naturally."  In contrast to his naturalness, Gatsby wears a blue coat after he goes to work for Dan Cody.  This allusion to blue for Gatsby is a recurring one, for his "blue lawns" of Chapter Three mingle with the "blue smoke of his brittle leaves" in one passage; and, his chauffeur wears "robins' egg blue" in Chapter Three.  Like the eyes of T. J. Eckleberg on the billboard in the Valley of Ashes, blue signifies illusions and alternatives to reality.  Curiously, at the party Daisy notices a lovely girl who talks with her director, a man with a "sort of blue nose" that Daisy says she likes. 

Grey is also mentioned.  As the color of the ashes in the area of destruction, this color represents lifelessness and possible decay.  Dan Cody, " a grey, florid man with a hard empty face."  Representing more decay, Cody is the man who has given Gatsby his "legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars." 

Decadence is suggested by yellow: "yellow cocktail music": of course, in connection with Daisy the color gold is used:  "...here's my little gold pencil..."  And, she, too, is associated with grey:  "A breeze stirred the grey haze of Daisy's fur collar." 

While the party has "the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion" as Nick feels an "unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't been there before."  At the end of the evening, Nick sits on the front steps where

It was dark here in front:  only the bright door sent ten square feet of light volleying out into the soft black morning.  Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, and indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass.

With such color imagery, illusion, decadence, and decay are suggested.  The unpleasantness that Nick senses is reflected in these colors as Chapter Six leads to the next chapter which contains the climax of Fitzgerald's narrative.

Back in Chapter Three, there are also several metaphors:

...an extra gardener toiled...repairing the ravages of the night before.

a pyramid of pulpless halves.

the opera of voices

the sea-change of faces and voices and color...

There are also oxymorons:

"enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names."

..."the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks."

Can you identify a literary device in chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby?

Two important and somewhat related devices occur near the end of this chapter. First, as Daisy leaves the party, a song is heard playing. "Three O'Clock in the Morning" is just one of the songs in the novel that references time. In this one, the singer expresses a desire to shut out the world and continue dancing with their beloved. In this case, the topical allusion (the song would have been contemporary to the novel) seems to construct Daisy's thoughts as she leaves Gatsby's party with its "romantic possibilities totally absent from her world."

A second device occurs shortly after the allusion and is called narrative ellipsis. Fitzgerald uses this more than a few times in the novel and always in important points. First, at the end of chapter 2, we find ellipsis when Nick describes his drunken night in New York City (". . . I was standing beside his bed.") What happened in that ellipsis to find Nick before a strange man's bed?

In Chapter 6, ellipsis is used when describing the memory that Nick has of Gatsby discussing his summer with Daisy:

if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was . . .
. . . One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street

The passage continues with a highly charged description of the moment Gatsby decided to kiss Daisy and "to forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath." The reader has been tempted to see Daisy vacillating between a shallow, spoiled woman and an enchanting fairy. Like Gatsby, the reader strains to find or to "recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy." That something is missing in any overt sense in the novel, yet the impulse to believe in an ideal beyond mere romantic love—an ideal that would drive Gatsby to construct a fantasy life in order to win Daisy back—is likely why this novel remains captivating and elusive to generations of readers since.

This particular paragraph, in which Nick describes Jay Gatsby, contains a number of literary devices:

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing. (99)

Nick uses a metaphor to compare Gatsby's elaborate fantasies about his future to ghosts that would haunt him at night. A metaphor compares two unalike things by saying that one thing is another; in this case, the verb "haunted" attributes ghostlike qualities to Gatsby's "conceits." He uses another metaphor to describe the moon as having a "wet light" that "soaked" Gatsby's clothes; he compares the light to a liquid, like water. A third metaphor compares Gatsby's fancies to something that might have a visual pattern: wallpaper, fabric, something visible and tangible. Next, he employs a paradox to describe the "unreality of reality." A paradox seems like something that cannot be true (e.g., for reality to be unreal) but nevertheless is.

What are some examples of literary devices in The Great Gatsby?

Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby is full of figurative language:

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into 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. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

Simile (found later in the chapter): "I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson’s mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall."

Metaphor: Valley of ashes is a "farm," a "garden," a "dumping ground"

Personification: the billboard's eyes "his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground"  and "a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track"

Imagery/Symbolism: "Valley of Ashes," "The Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckelburg," "West Egg," "Gray," "blindness."

What are the three main literary elements in The Great Gatsby?

Fitzgerald's artisitic triumph, The Great Gatsby, exhibits a literary beauty that sets it apart as the author makes great use of symboism, imagery, and figurative language.

SYMBOLISM

1.  The green light on the end of Daisy's pier represents Jay Gatsby's American dreams of "winning the girl" and achieving monetary success.  It also symbolizes Daisy's being far away and unreachable, perhaps, even illusionary.

2. The disembodied eyes of Doctor T. J. Ecklesberg on the billboard that stands in the corrupt Valley of Ashes symbolize the blindness to their corruption that those of the Jazz Age have, as well as brooding presence over the slum area where George Wilson declares "God sees everything" after his wife Myrtle dies.

3. The colors yellow and white have great significance.  Daisy, whose car is white when Jay meets her, who dresses in white, and whose name suggests a white flower suggests innocence, naivete, and purity.  However, the center of the daisy flower is yellow, the color of corruption and greed.  Like the flower, Daisy appears innocent, but at her core is corruption and love of money.  (Nick describes her voice as sounding like money.)

4. Flowers - Besides Daisy, Myrtle Wilson also has a flower name.

5. The Valley of Ashes - Like the "Wasteland" of T. S. Eliot, which suggests corruption, loneliness and despair, and gloom.

IMAGERY

The mythological imagery of Gatsby's car that has fenders like wings  possesses a rich cream color, "bright with nickel," is described as Nick states that it is

terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns.  Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town

The human molars that Myron Wolfscheim has as cuff-links bespeaks much of his cruel character.  And, there is much color imagery:

sidewalks of "white with moonlight"; Gatsby gulps down "the incomparable mile of wonder"; the producer at the party who has "a blue nose'; Daisy's "gold pencil"; the guests at Gatsby's parties who are "the same many-colred, may-keyed"; the greyness of the Valley of Ashes, "a grey florid man with a hard empty face," Dan Cody.

Daisy weeps with the joy of materialism and buries her face in the many-colored shirts that Gatsby brings out for her perusal when she visits his house.

Light and dark imagery is also employed in novel.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Perhaps the greatest beauty in Fitzgerald's novel is his use of figurative language, the execution of which is an absolute triumph.  The novel abounds in simile, metaphor, euphemism, and other figurative devices.  Critic Charles Thomas Samuels states that The Great Gatsby has "the precision and splendor of a lyric poem" and is a novel that has made language "celebrate itself."  (See the link below to read his essay)

1.  Simile - In Chapter Two, Fitzgerald writes, "I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall."

2. Metaphor - West Egg and East Egg are metaphors for the sections of New York which are part of the novel's setting.  The West, Midwest represents decency and basic principles of honesty, while the East represents moral decay, materialism, and deceit.

3.  Euphemisms - Gatsby speaks of his "advantages" as a young man meaning his introduction to Dan Cody.  A "businessman" is Meyer Wolfscheim and "yatching" is used in reference to rumrunning.  Wolfscheim asks Nick if he is looking for a "business gonnegtion" [business connection] referring to entry into bootlegging.  Jordan Baker refers to Mrytle Wilson as "some woman" rather than Tom's mistress.

When Gatsby relates his "involvement" with the struggle of the Montenegro populace, he says he sympathized with the "brave struggles" which were, in reality, a deadly battle.

Of course, Nick uses euphemisms often saying that he is "casually sorry" for Jordan Baker who is "incurably dishonest."

________________

Critic Charles Thomas Samuels praises The Great Gatsby as having "the precision and splendor of a lyric poem" while possessing a distinctive language that "celebrates itself."  (See the link below to read his essay.)

What literary devices are used in The Great Gatsby?

F. Scott Fitzgerald uses a variety of literary devices in The Great Gatsby, including metaphor, simile, imagery, personification, paradox, irony, symbolism, foreshadowing, and hyperbole. Let's look at an example of each.

Metaphor appears in the description of the lawn that “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.” The lawn seems to be compared to an animal here, but we might also identify this as an example of personification. It is also a vivid piece of imagery.

We see a simile in the comment that the Middle West “now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe” rather than the “warm center of the world.” Another example of personification appears when horns are said to groan incessantly.

Paradox and irony both lie at the center of the novel. Gatsby appears to be extremely popular, and he desires to be liked and admired, yet his friends are not friends at all. Only one friend actually comes to his funeral. Here is both paradox, a contradictory absurdity, and irony. The American dream that Gatsby has long sought turns out to be a nightmare in the end.

Symbols in the story include the green light at the end of the dock that, to Gatsby, represents Daisy and his desire for her, and Gatsby's mansion that represents his wealth and its shallowness.

We see foreshadowing in the novel when Nick witnesses Gatsby reaching out for the green light but never being able to embrace it. Indeed, Gatsby will never really be able to have Daisy's love either.

Finally, hyperbole appears in the mention of the thousand-year-old aunt.

How do the essential elements of a novel enhance the theme in The Great Gatsby?

[eNotes educators are only permitted to answer one question per post.]

One element of a story is conflict. The conflict element of a story is what the plot revolves around. In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the characters are pitted against one another to drive the plot, which revolves around the story's themes.

Gatsby is a young man hungry to make life what he wants it to be, having grown up poor with few prospects for success.

His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. …he invented...Jay Gatsby...and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

Gatsby's life is based on a lie; however, it becomes obvious that he believes the lie completely. What never changes is his hunger for the things he believes will make him happy. Daisy is the one thing he cannot have that haunts him until the premature end of the fantastic life he has created. He is obsessed with Daisy, but Daisy cares for him only in a shallow self-serving way. What she does love is the life that Tom Buchanan can give her—one of wealth and ease. And while she leads Gatsby on, she refuses to leave Tom, even though she believes Tom is well beneath her:

I married him because I thought he was a gentleman...I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe.

Buchanan is a man the reader grows to hate: certainly Fitzgerald wants it this way, for Tom is cruel, bullying, obnoxious, etc. The reader may find himself rooting for Gatsby because Buchanan is so despicable:

...Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face, discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy's name.

"Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. "I'll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai——"

Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

The novel primarily revolves around the struggle between Buchanan and Gatsby over Daisy. There are other conflicts regarding Gatsby's reputation and how he has really made his money, and between Nick and Jordan; however, Gatsby's hunger for that which he can never have is at the center of the plot—galvanized forward with Daisy and Jay's meetings, and Tom's suspicions. Even in the end, Gatsby takes the blame for the car accident that takes Myrtle's life, though Daisy was the one driving. Wilson kills Jay, believing that he was responsible for Myrtle's death. The reader clearly sees how little character Daisy has once Gatsby is dead. She does not come to his funeral: in fact, she never overtly bats an eyelash. Nick accurately relays just how insubstantial Daisy and Tom are—in this way, showing us that perhaps the two were made for each other.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness...and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

The first of the themes these conflicts enhance is "culture clash." 

Tom and Daisy Buchanan—[from the East] were unfair, corrupt, and materialistic.

On the other hand, Jay and Nick come from the Midwest; Nick is seen as "fair, relatively innocent, unsophisticated," and Jay is the epitome of idealism.

The theme of the "American dream" is seen in Jay as he makes his own way in the world; however, Daisy, his idea of "the perfect dream," destroys him. "Appearance vs. reality" and "moral corruption" are themes that are also addressed in these conflicts, with Jay, Tom and Daisy.

What literary elements are used to demonstrate a central theme in The Great Gatsby?

First you'll need to decide on a meaningful theme. I might suggest using the disillusionment of the American dream as the basis for your analysis. It would be feasible to construct a thesis arguing that Fitzgerald's ultimate purpose is to demonstrate that the American dream is an illusion and that efforts to fully realize it lead to destruction.

You could construct body paragraphs that then examine how each of the following contribute to this overall theme:

• Nick's narration: Imagine what a different novel this would have been if Gatsby had narrated the story. The mystery behind the central character would be lost, and the intrigue inherent in Gatsby's character would be diminished. Using Nick as a narrator allows readers to get to know Gatsby by degrees, the details of his past and his business dealings emerging slowly over time. In this way, Nick's narration allows Gatsby to be somewhat of an illusion, much like the American dream. Nick believes that Gatsby is "great," yet there is much that he is willing to overlook in his assessment of Gatsby's character (such as the fact that he actively pursues another man's wife).
• The setting: Gatsby believes that his mansion in West Egg will allow him access to Daisy and her lifestyle. Unfortunately, he fails to realize that a chasm exists between his setting and Daisy's home in East Egg, which favors old money. Despite achieving incredible wealth, Gatsby can never reach across the bay to Daisy's home in East Egg, because he can never be the man that Tom represents, supported by longtime family wealth. Gatsby is ultimately forced to confront the truth that he has been disillusioned regarding the acquisition of wealth and the power it can afford him.
• The symbolism of the bay: The bay that separates East and West Egg enforces a physical separation between Daisy and Gatsby. Several times, Gatsby is seen looking across that bay, longing to reach Daisy on the other side. Socially, he can never make the leap to East Egg, demonstrating the impossibility of fully realizing his ultimate dream.
• Imagery of light and whiteness: When Nick visits Daisy's home, she and Jordan are enveloped in whiteness, often associated with innocence. Of course, neither of these women is particularly angelic, so the appearance of innocence is misleading. When Tom and Nick stop by Wilson's station, Myrtle "block[s] out the light from the office door," which symbolizes her efforts to hide the truth. When Nick attends Gatsby's party in chapter 3, there are numerous references to the way the light changes. When Daisy appears at Gatsby's house, he points out to her that the "whole front of it catches the light." Light and whiteness can symbolize truth, innocence, and goodness. Of course, their usages prove ironic as Daisy ultimately rejects Gatsby's pursuit of her. This isn't a novel of truth and goodness but of deception and lies.
• The symbolism of Gatsby's mansion: Although intentionally chosen to demonstrate that he is worthy of Daisy, Gatsby is very much alone in his estate. He has no close friends besides Nick, and many people who attend his lavish parties don't even know him. This reveals a hard truth about the American dream: Sometimes the sacrifices people make to achieve a lifestyle of splendor don't create meaningful relationships. In the end, Gatsby dies alone, and none of the partygoers care enough to even attend his funeral.
• If you need further ideas, you could examine the characterization of Daisy (Isn't it interesting that her very name connotes an innocence and purity that stands in sharp contrast to her character?), the symbolism of cars (Gatsby's Rolls-Royce, a symbol of wealth and vanity, both carries people to Gatsby's parties and kills Myrtle), and the symbolism of clocks and time (Gatsby fails to realize that Daisy has moved on and can never be his again; time has forever separated them).

What are the story elements, diction, and literary devices in The Great Gatsby?

The diction is introspective and compassionate in terms of Nick Carraway, and the literary devices include dialogue, imagery, and symbolism.

The diction—that is, the words used in the novel—can vary, depending on who is speaking. In terms of the narrator, Nick Carraway, the diction tends to be measured and reflective. The second paragraph prepares the reader for thoughtful diction. As Nick’s father tells him, “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one. Just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Carraway’s concerned diction stays stable throughout the novel, including when he meets Gatsby’s father. With Tom Buchanan, the diction becomes more aggressive and cocky. Gatsby’s diction is rueful, like when he calls Nick “old sport.” Daisy’s diction can be flippant. Think about when she says she hopes her daughter becomes “a beautiful little fool.”

The novel features many literary devices. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses dialogue to illustrate the fraught relationships between the characters. Consider how the conversation about “love” between Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby at the Plaza Hotel emphasizes their tension. Fitzgerald also uses imagery to create vivid pictures of Gatsby’s opulent world, and he includes symbols—Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes and the color green, among them—to address complex topics like omniscience, aspiration, and decay.