Chapter 2 Gatsby Journal

Chapter 2 Gatsby Journal

“Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher on the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (Nick, p. 23)
This quote by Nick is loaded with figurative language. From the looks of things it seems like there is personification and hyperbole. He uses personification when he says, “our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy.” This is personification because he gives human qualities to an inanimate object by saying that they have been keeping secrets. He also uses another form of figurative language in the same quote when he says, “Yet high over the line of yellow windows must etc.” He uses hyperbole when he says how his yellow windows are high over the city. In my opinion this is a hyperbole because there’s is no way that HIS windows would be so high that he could say they’re high above the city.

“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.”

These few sentences contain smorgasbord of figurative language. Just looking at these few lines, I see the use of hyperbole a lot, and also the use a metaphor. He first uses hyperbole when he says, “Above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it.” This is hyperbole because he over-exaggerates the “endless spasms of bleak dust.” He also uses hyperbole when he says, “The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their irises are one yard high.” This is defiantly hyperbole because there is no way possible that his eyes would be so gigantic that they would be one yard high. There is also the use of a metaphor in this quote. Metaphor is used when he says, “They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.” This is a metaphor because when he speaks about enormous yellow spectacles he is actually talking about Doctor Eckleburg’s glasses.