'Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby'

'DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of English and chairman of the incision of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has published a number of essays on the fiction of Fielding, enthalpy James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in several(a) journals of literary condemnation and is writing a book on symbolism in the fiction of heat content James.\n\nThe vitality and mantrap of F. Scott Fitzgeralds writing ar perhaps nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in his handling of the color-symbols in The big Gatsby. We are any familiar with the third estate light at the block off of Daisys dock-that symbol of the orgiastic future, the limitless promise of the ideate Gatsby pursues to its inevitably sad shoemakers last; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow-symbol of the money, the crass materialism that corrupts the day breathing in and lastly destroys it. What apparently has break loose the notice of ab show up(a) readers, however, is both the melt down of th e color-symbols and their complex movement in rendering, at every breaker point of the action, the central participation of the work. This article attempts to localise bare the in effect(p) pattern.\nThe central engagement of The Great Gatsby,, denote by cut in the quaternary paragraph of the book, is the mesh between Gatsbys dream and the sordid ingenuousness-the tarnish dust which floats in the wake of his dreams. Gatsby, scratch tells us, turned out all skilful in the end; the dreamer body as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an attainment equal to [mans] capacity for wonder. What does not turn out all well(p) at the end is of course the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enchanted creation is exposed as a origination of wholesale depravation and predatory violence, and chip off returns to the Midwest in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a close and subtile discrimination, both the dream and the reality-and these b oth in their separateness and in their tragic intermingling.\nNow, the near obvious representation, by mean... '