Scott Fitzgerald describes Nick Carraway's first visit to Gatsby's party as an extravagant, gaudy social meeting that creates feelings of liveliness and excitement in the reader by using visual imagery and hyperbole. .
The party is frequently described as very colorful. "And already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors.the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music.the seachange of faces and voices and color." The author mentions color so often because of the mood and feelings it conveys. Colors create an image of liveliness and excitement because of the brightness and diversity of them. The author mentions yellow more than once when he states the gaudy primary colors and the yellow cocktail music. The mood the author is trying to associate with yellow is one of happiness, pleasure, and contentment. In order to create that mood he uses synesthesia and describes the music as yellow, (yellow is something one would associate with sight, not sound) and by doing so, he relates yellow visuals, such as sunshine or marigolds, to the music, which gives the reader the idea that the music being played is blissful and happy. When the reader gets the idea of happy music in the background the whole scene of the party falls together as one of excitement and fun, which is exactly what the author was trying to get across.
The other method of description the author uses to show how extravagant and over-blown Gatsby's party is, is hyperbole. The author describes the women at the party as having "hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile." He does not say right out that the women are extremely rich, high class, and in style, but he uses the hyperbole that they were wearing "shawls beyond the dreams of Castile" to get the same point across. They most likely were not wearing shawls beyond the dreams of Castile, but by exaggerating like that, the author gives the reader the idea that these women are indeed ridiculously rich, and that further gives the reader the idea of how extravagant Gatsby's party is.
