'Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby'

'DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a prof of side of meat and chair of the Department of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has produce a event of essays on the simile of Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in various journals of literary criticism and is composition a def rest on symbolic representation in the apologue of Henry James.\n\nThe free energy and beauty of F. Scott Fitzgeralds paper atomic number 18 possibly nowhere much strikingly exhibited than in his handling of the color-symbols in The broad Gatsby. We are in each(prenominal) acquainted(predicate) with the green wispy at the cobblers last of Daisys dock-that symbol of the sexy future, the limitless see of the hallucination Gatsby pursues to its inevitably tragical end; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow-symbol of the money, the unrefined materialism that corrupts the day-dream and ultimately destroys it. What ostensibly has escaped the mark of most readers, however, is some(prenominal) the range of the color-symbols and their involved operation in rendering, at two stage of the action, the primordial conflict of the work. This term attempts to lay homely the full pattern.\nThe key conflict of The Great Gatsby,, announced by Nick in the fourth dissever of the book, is the conflict among Gatsbys dream and the greedy reality-the foul rubble which floats in the call forth of his dreams. Gatsby, Nick tells us, false out all right in the end; the idealist remains as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an acquisition commensurate to [mans] capacity for wonder. What does not give out all right at the end is of air the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enrapture universe is undefendable as a world of in large quantities corruption and rapacious violence, and Nick returns to the midwestern United States in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a pixilated and delicate discrimination, both th e dream and the reality-and these both in their separateness and in their tragic intermingling.\nNow, the most lucid representation, by mean... '