Blog Project # 2 Diction

The diction that Fitzgerald uses throughout the novel allows him to further explain his disgust for the greed and lust for the East in the early twentieth century.                                                   

When Carraway describes Gatsby’s early life and Gatsby’s encounter with Dan Cody, he says how he “brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon.” (Fitzgerald 100). This is a rather blunt way of showing that the East was now had “savage violence,” but allows the author to express his point. Both the words savage and violence have a negative connotation and show the author trying to convey that Dan Cody has brought damaging aspects to the East.                                                                                                       When Carraway is expressing his distaste for the east brings compares it to a night scene by El Greco.  He describes the picture as “a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lusterless moon” (Fitzgerald 176). After this sad depiction of the east, allowing for the reader to see a dark mental picture, he carries on with the depiction of the “solemn men” who are carrying a “drunken woman in a white evening dress” (Fitzgerald 176). Words like grotesque, solemn and sullen, all give a depressed and run-down feeling which further allows the author to show his disgust for the cities and societies of the East. The depiction of the men carrying the drunken woman show that the morals of the society have decayed and that he wanted to show this absence of decency in the East.                             When describing the East through his choice of words and phrases, Carraway can almost always be seen as depicting it as a gloomy, corrupt and immoral place that is superior to the West, although to him, has a “quality of distortion.”