Diction leads to tone. It's the gateway rhetorical strategy. Soon they'll be using zeugmas for all we know!

• ·         To open Chapter II, Fitzgerald paints the dismal picture of “the valley of ashes” with not only imagery, but with his potent diction. He depicts this valley “between West Egg and New York” as being a “desolate” wasteland “where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens”, where the “ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud” (23). Using such words as “desolate,” “ash-gray,” “grotesque,” and “swarm” lend a dreary and miserable tone to the passage which serves to emphasize the absolute desolation and gloom of the valley and establishes the overall sadness that pervades the rest of the chapter.

• ·         In Nick’s description of his everyday life in Chapter III, he discloses that he is beginning to like New York and its “racy, adventurous feel” (56). He admits that he walks up Fifth Avenue and people-watches and imagines himself with “romantic women” he sees. “In [his] mind, [he] follows them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at [him] before they faded through a door into warm darkness.” The gentle goodbyes of his fantasies and the “haunting loneliness” that “the enchanted metropolitan twilight” makes him feel all possess an air of soft sadness that craft a melancholy tone which he goes on to use throughout his description of his life. This melancholy description of his life is perhaps used to contrast and highlight the fast-paced lavishness of Gatsby’s which he depicts earlier in the chapter.