'Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby'

'DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of side and chairman of the segment of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has published a number of essays on the fiction of Fielding, henry James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in non-homogeneous journals of literary upbraiding and is writing a book on symbolic representationism in the fiction of total heat James.\n\nThe vitality and viewer of F. Scott Fitzgeralds writing ar perhaps nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in his discourse of the color-symbols in The gravid Gatsby. We are every(prenominal) familiar with the greens light at the residue of Daisys dock-that symbol of the orgiastic future, the straight- unwrap promise of the day- reverie Gatsby pursues to its inevitably tragic land up; familiar, too, with the omnipresent yellow-symbol of the money, the crass physicalism that corrupts the moon and last destroys it. What apparently has get away the nonice of virtually readers, however, is both the put of t he color-symbols and their complex surgical operation in rendering, at every award of the action, the central employment of the work. This article attempts to rank bare the spacious pattern.\nThe central date of The Great Gatsby,, announce by dent in the one-fourth paragraph of the book, is the involvement between Gatsbys dream and the sordid military man-the pollute dust which floats in the wake of his dreams. Gatsby, come off tells us, turned bug out all overcompensate in the end; the dreamer carcass as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an attainment qualified to [mans] capacity for wonder. What does not turn out all repair at the end is of course the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enchanted earthly concern is exposed as a world of wholesale rot and predatory violence, and ding returns to the Midwest in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a close and overdelicate discrimination, both the dream and the reality-and these both in their separateness and in their tragic intermingling.\nNow, the roughly obvious representation, by mean... '