This post will be a quick insight into some techniques writers throughout time have used to tap into their readers mind and pull out an effect more powerful than seeing a cool crossover or passionate shipping tale. Specifically, I want to impress the idea of the end’s relationship with the beginning, honing in on the motif of a character’s reversal of fortune. Understanding literary techniques can, hopefully, bring to light how struggling authors can make their stories more dynamic, interesting, and impactful.

Reversal of fortune is fairly easy to grasp once examples are given. In the Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the success of Gatsby is quickly undercut when (spoiler?) he is involved in a car accident and finally shot by a vengeful husband. But reversals can be layered over each other, stretching beyond the opposing relation of success versus failure. The circumstances of Gatsby’s death have him dying in his pool, alone, which is a stark contrast to the way his character is portrayed throughout the book. He is wealthy, throws parties, and everyone is ready to speak well of Mr. Gatsby. Fitzgerald plays on human fear in this reversal of fortune. The way people live their life usually includes close friends and relatives, and Gatsby’s parties express this social need to an almost ludicrous degree.  The environment of laughter, music, and booze elicits our own memory and understanding of friendship, intimacy, and turns the scene of the first major party into an experience felt, not read. The sudden loss takes this away for the reader, peeling back this façade. The text does this to demonstrate the emptiness of friends bought by excessive spending, supporting the classic theme of money failing to buy true pleasure and happiness. Another layer deeper, the book also argues that loneliness is the true nature of Gatsby’s life in the narrator’s first sighting of Gatsby; he stands alone at his porch, which looks out across the water to a woman he has always wanted but can’t have. The scene alone conveys a stoic loneliness. The setting of a goal, but inability to achieve or finish it, leaves people incomplete. There’s almost an obsession with completing a task, of finally achieving one’s goal. But in that goal, the reader and the narrator are given time to think. In the absence of people and parties, one begins to wonder if Gatsby’s just a man with a hopeless dream.

The application of reversal of fortune comes in many ways, and this example is not to show one strict method. The general principles are its layering, scene contrasts, and purpose of reversal. Layers allow a single idea to be repeatedly explored, reaffirmed, and diversified. It makes a single encounter seem more like a constant truth. Scene building and their contrasts are essential, and are done through eliciting the memories, emotions, and feelings of the reader, so that the contrast not only happens on the page, but in the reader’s own mind. Finally, the reversal targets a specific aspect of the character, allowing for clarity. Analyzing a literary technique alone is not an effortless task and the denser and more ambiguous the text becomes, the more energy is required to pull a moral lesson from its meaning.