Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby

DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of English and head of the Department of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has make a number of essays on the fiction of Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in various journals of literary admonition and is writing a declargon on symbolism in the fiction of Henry James.\n\nThe brio and beauty of F. Scott Fitzgeralds writing argon perhaps nowhere to a greater extent strikingly exhibited than in his intervention of the color-symbols in The Great Gatsby. We are all familiar with the dark-green light at the cease of Daisys dock-that symbol of the orgiastic future, the innumerable promise of the vision Gatsby pursues to its inescapably tragic end; familiar, too, with the present yellow-symbol of the money, the crass materialism that corrupts the daydream and ultimately destroys it. What apparently has fly the notice of just about readers, however, is two the range of the color-symbols and their complex milita ry operation in rendering, at both stage of the action, the central meshing of the work. This article attempts to lay patent the full pattern.\nThe central involvement of The Great Gatsby,, announced by Nick in the fourth part paragraph of the book, is the conflict amidst Gatsbys dream and the sordid candor-the insalubrious dust which floats in the waken of his dreams. Gatsby, Nick tells us, turned forbidden all right in the end; the dreamer corpse as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an attainment commensurate to [mans] mental ability for wonder. What does not turn prohibited all right at the end is of course the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enchanted universe is undefendable as a cosmos of wholesale corruption and wolfish violence, and Nick returns to the Midwest in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a most and delicate discrimination, both the dream and the reality-and these both in their separateness and in their t ragic intermingling.\nNow, the most obvious representation, by mean...