Great Gatsby Chapters 4-5

                      “Taking a white card from his wallet, he waved it before the man’s eyes.”

        Here, Gatsby is speeding around long island city and a motorcycle policeman pulls him over. At Gatsby’s recognition of the policeman he pulls out a white Christmas card sent to him by a commissioner and the policeman immediately recognizes it and lets Gatsby go without any consequences. In this date and situation it may seem not out of the ordinary to get favors or not have any consequences when disobeying the law, but in present times this is extremely unusual and would not happen. This leads the reader to believe that if they lived in the early 1920’s and were highly respected because of their rank in the military or any other authority then they could get away with mediocre crimes and have the police wrapped around their finger.

                                    “The great bridge”

       Here the author tries to persuade the reader that the bridge in which they are crossing under, after previously being stopped by a policeman, is simply great a magnificent and the city that is just beyond it is truly amazing. The author uses the word “bridge” instead of different, more eccentric words that he previously has been using to describe other objects that he has surpassed. If this bridge is truly “great” and superior to any other such structure in the city then the author should have used more than one word to describe it. The author wants the reader to believe that this bridge is amazing and flush with every other object in the book but he does not point that out very well which leads the reader to have mixed feelings as to why this bridge is great and therefore they do not believe the author and the bridge is less than casual.  

        “Miss Baker’s a great sportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all right.”

       In this quotation the author is writing about how Miss Baker is great woman, but in reality, she very well could not be. Perhaps she is just using the character of a great person as a disguise to everybody until she can get what she wants. For instance, she could play off the role of a poor, innocent, and hapless young lady until she finds the right man that has excess amounts of money to give to her, she would marry him, convince him to not get a prenuptial agreement and bam, she divorces him several months later, taking half of his money and repeating that same character over and over again until she fulfills her need of having all the money she desires.

                      “The colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever”

       Here the author is trying to make the reader believe that after all this time of Gatsby not getting to see Daisy, they finally reunite. Simple enough, this is not true, Gatsby has being exploring the world for years after the death of his family and has had ample enough time to meet with daisy once again but he has been otherwise occupied with other things such as hunting game in Europe and saving the lives of men in his military occupancy.

                                           “That voice was a deathless song.”

     By using the word deathless to describe Gatsby’s voice, the author tries to persuade the reader that Gatsby’s singing is nothing less than amazing and it should overpower everyone else in the room because of how amazing it is.