Halliday states that foregrounding refers to the standing out of linguistic features in a text which contributes to the total meaning of the writer. According to Mukarovsky and Leech, foregrounding can be achieved through deviation and parallelism. So far, a few stylistic researches on foregrounding in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby have been conducted. Nevertheless, the researches mainly focus on the thematic and aesthetic effects created by foregrounding. With a foregrounding analysis of The Great Gatsby, the modal of foregrounding is proved to be an excellent tool in revealing the protagonist’s mental world. The present study concentrates on proving that Gatsby’s anxiety exposed by the deviation and parallelism patterns, is not merely status anxiety but cultural anxiety that previous critics, who are concerned on psychological aspect of the protagonist, neglect. What’s more, Gatsby’s failure to ease his cultural anxiety reveals the predicament of all the metropolitan residents resulting from the interplay between intellectual relationship and money economy. It is argued that grasping the essence of Gatsby’s anxiety revealed by the foregrounding patterns with Bhabha’s mimicry theory and investigating into the reasons of his inability to get rid off anxiety with Simmel’s theory of the metropolis and mental life are of great significance to reveal the inner world of American people in the 20th century.