Weight a Minute

Towards the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Rich Boy", the main character Anson Hunter wanders around New York desperately and unsuccessfully trying to find something to do. This significant moment of confusion and loss is displayed in the following passage:

"He was a dignified, impressive young man, rather stout now, but otherwise unmarked by dissipation. He could have been cast for a pillar of something--at times you were sure it was not society, at others nothing else--for the law, for the church. He stood for a few minutes motionless on the sidewalk in front of a 47th Street apartment-house; for almost the first time in his life he had nothing whatever to do" (Fitzgerald 181).

Anson's weight gain is alluded to numerous times in the short story and it becomes a metaphor of his increasing resistance to the changing times. Notably this paragraph is very clear about Anson's massive weight. By the time he finds himself wandering the streets of New York he is irrelevant to his peers and a monument to the way things were. He is weighed down by antiquated notions of class, women, and relationships therefore he cannot adapt to his new environment. He is stout meaning he is unyielding as well as fat. Fitzgerald is arguing that class is an ever changing notion and that those who do not compromise their old ways of thinking become stuck in time.

What other devices does Fitzgerald use to illustrate how class evolves?