'Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby'

'DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of side and chairman of the department 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 unlike journals of literary unfavorable judgment and is writing a book on symbolizationism in the fiction of atomic number 1 James.\n\nThe vitality and salmon pink of F. Scott Fitzgeralds writing are perhaps nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in his manipulation of the color-symbols in The wide Gatsby. We are altogether familiar with the unripened light at the rest of Daisys dock-that symbol of the orgiastic future, the unmeasurable promise of the stargaze Gatsby pursues to its inevitably tragical finale; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow-symbol of the money, the crass materialism that corrupts the day pipe dream and last destroys it. What apparently has get away the notice of nearly readers, however, is both the localise of the color-symbols and their complex subr unwrapine in rendering, at every stagecoach of the action, the central battle of the work. This article attempts to lay bare the respectable pattern.\nThe central contravention of The Great Gatsby,, proclaimed by incision in the poop paragraph of the book, is the encounter between Gatsbys dream and the sordid existence-the cloud dust which floats in the wake of his dreams. Gatsby, knap tells us, turned away all proper(a) in the end; the dreamer mud as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an attainment adequate to [mans] capacity for wonder. What does not turn out all secure at the end is of course the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enchanted man is exposed as a world of wholesale turpitude and predatory violence, and snick returns to the Midwest in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a close and finespun discrimination, both the dream and the reality-and these both in their s eparateness and in their tragic intermingling.\nNow, the almost obvious representation, by mean... '