Examples Of Imagery In The Great Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald uses magical imagery to emphasize the mysteriousness of Gatsby and his life. Gatsby is a character that no one knows much about. He throws glamourous parties in which most of the people invited have never met him. People make up rumors about Gatsby that no one can confirm or deny, such as the fact that he is an Oxford graduate, or that he once killed a man. Jay Gatsby lives luxuriously and most are jealous of him. They all want this version of the American Dream that they think Gatsby has obtained because they can only see what he shows them. As magicians often say, magic is all about misdirection. The magic of Jay Gatsby is misdirecting everyone from his former identity of James Gatz, a poor farmer from the midwest.

Magical imagery in The Great Gatsby enforces the notion that no one really knows Gatsby even if they think they do. It keeps him mysteriously hidden from what people think they see. The narrator Nick says, “When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and i was alone again in the
Everybody thinks he has everything he could ever want. He is so stuck in this vision of himself that he believes he has obtained the american dream as well. But in reality he is fooling himself. He realizes at the end that he has been blind to the fact that he does not actually have everything, “Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever” (98). The green light represents Gatsby's american dream. Part of his personal American Dream is to get his ¨enchanted object,¨ Daisy. Getting Daisy means moving up the social scale for Gatsby. Fitzgerald uses ¨vanished forever¨ to show how Gatsby is coming to a realization that even if people think he has it all he will never be able to truly achieve this American Dream he has tried so hard to convince himself he already