Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby

DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of position and chairman of the Department of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has published a re criminal of essays on the fiction of Fielding, henry James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in various journals of literary criticism and is typography a book on symbolization in the fiction of heat content James.\n\nThe vitality and beauty of F. Scott Fitzgeralds writing are perhaps nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in his handling of the color-symbols in The bully Gatsby. We are all acquainted(predicate) with the green light at the closedown of Daisys dock-that symbol of the orgiastic future, the limitless promise of the ideate Gatsby pursues to its inevitably tragic end; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow-symbol of the money, the crass materialism that corrupts the romance and ultimately destroys it. What plain has escaped the notice of most readers, however, is twain the range of the color-symbols and their thi ckening operation in rendering, at every stage of the action, the cardinal impinge of the work. This article attempts to write down bare the full pattern.\nThe central conflict of The Great Gatsby,, inform by Nick in the fourth paragraph of the book, is the conflict between Gatsbys dream and the poorly(p) reality-the foul dust which floats in the wake of his dreams. Gatsby, Nick tells us, turn out all obligation in the end; the escapist remains as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an attainment sufficient to [mans] capacity for wonder. What does not turn out all reform at the end is of fall the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enchanted beingness is exposed as a world of wholesale putrefaction and predatory violence, and Nick returns to the middle west in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a close and delicate discrimination, both the dream and the reality-and these both in their separateness and in their tragic intermingli ng.\nNow, the most obvious representation, by mean...