American Literature
Ms. Gibbs
17 November 2016
The Great Gatsby VS Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town
Love can mean many different things to many different people, love to some isn't just one feeling. It is a rollercoaster of sad and happy points. But the person who shares these feelings or for whom they have feelings for is gonna pick them up and keep them going through all of the hard times. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and e.e cummings, author of Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town convey similar themes of love. Both selections reveal that sometimes love can trump all things but not always, through the use of diction, imagery, and symbolism.
In The Great Gatsby there is a lot of symbolism that deals with …show more content…
In The Great Gatsby Nick says, “Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans,”(Fitzgerald 115) This is using the color white to show the image of her innocent and how that played into her love affair with Gatsby because that pretty much is what killed him, she didn’t know what to do because of her innocence and that is what essentially killed him. Another major image is the eyes of T.J Eckleburg, Nick describes them as, “ blue and gigantic,”(Fitzgerald 23) looked over the Valley Of Ashes where Tom who is Daisy’s husband his mistress lived and where Daisy hit Myrtle the mistress. This is an image of the negatives of love because of the events that happened that the eyes of T.J Eckleburg saw eventually caused Gatsby’s death and ended the love connection. Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town has many images also but it is because of the odd word choice. One image is revealed in the line saying,” all by all deep by deep.”(Cummings 29) Through this image one can see their love like a vast ocean even when they died they were still together. Another image is the way they describe time passing by is, “ summer autumn winter spring” (Cummings 11)this is making the image of how long their love lasted it could last through seasons and all the hardships the different seasons …show more content…
In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby says, “ What do you think of that? It stopped raining”(Fitzgerald 89)when he said that his voice was full of excitement because he had only wanted two things to happen that day for it to stop raining but also he had finally seen and talked to Daisy for the first time in 5 years, you can tell this through his word choice and his tone. Another important part of the diction of this story is when Tom is talking to Jordan and Nick about who Gastby really is and says, “An Oxford man! Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”(Fitzgerald 122)This is important to the diction because you see how Tom talks about Gatsby as if he has no respect for him, this is important to the theme cause him using these words cuts off the love about Gatsby. In Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town does not use specific diction but just uses the words anyone and no one as the name of a man and a woman who fall deeply in love. This is important because this choice of diction changes the whole theme of the story. One other diction choice was using the seasons instead of time which is also very big with the theme because it shows how long there love is going to