select a passage that describes the party. Respond to the passage by identifying the stylistic devices used by the author to describe the party, and comment the effect these strategies have on your own reaction to this party and its participants
I like the following passage,
"The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light."
I like the sense of "otherworldliness" that Fitzgerald brings to this passage. The party personifies the Earth leaving its orbit as it "lurches away from the sun." The crowds become masses of humanity that enter into a wild dimension. Like one large beast, they "dissolve and form in the same breath." Fitzgerald makes Gatsby's party into a surreal experience where all sense of reality has been left at the door.
