Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby

DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of English and chairman of the subdivision of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has published a number of essays on the parable of Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in conglomerate journals of literary criticism and is physical composition a book on signism in the fiction of Henry James.\n\nThe vitality and yellowish pink of F. Scott Fitzgeralds writing are maybe nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in his handling of the color-symbols in The commodious Gatsby. We are altogether familiar with the green diminish at the revoke of Daisys dock-that symbol of the orgiastic future, the limitless foreshadow of the breathing in Gatsby pursues to its inevitably tragical rarity; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow-symbol of the money, the crass materialism that corrupts the dream and last destroys it. What apparently has escaped the mention of most readers, however, is both the telescope of the color- symbols and their complex operation in rendering, at every point of the action, the central conflict of the work. This hold attempts to lay bare the full pattern.\nThe central conflict of The Great Gatsby,, announced by break away in the fourth split of the book, is the conflict between Gatsbys dream and the sordid reality-the foul form which floats in the wake of his dreams. Gatsby, cut tells us, turned out any right in the end; the dreamer remains as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an learning commensurate to [mans] capacity for wonder. What does non turn out every(prenominal) right at the end is of course the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enthrall universe is exposed as a world of in large quantities corruption and predatory violence, and mountain pass returns to the Midwest in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a close and pure discrimination, both the dream and the reality-and these both in their separateness and in their tragic intermingling.\nNow, the most limpid representation, by mean...