Gatbsy Research

Gatsby lives his life like a dream, with everything perfect and the girl that he loves loving him back and being the white little angel that he has built her up to be. The striking and beautiful use of colors delicately separates the dream and the reality just like they separate Daisy from the angel. It seems that Gatsby’s mind is filled with all colors, but he is blind to them all but green which stands for Daisy. Fitzgerald’s use of colors creates depth to everything in the story and gives something more beautiful and emotional to The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald uses a large range of colors as symbols in The Great Gatsby.

Beautifully, Fitzgerald fills Jay Gatsby’s parties with vivid colors. Rich colors like silver and gold show up, symbolizing his wealth and money. At Gatsby’s famous parties “the turkeys [are] bewitched to a dark gold” and “the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music” (Fitzgerald 40). Sometimes, the rich gold becomes yellow. This is because Gatsby’s wealth is only a small, sweet sensation. He is not of old money like the Buchanan’s on East Egg. Much like gold, the color silver also shows wealth. It is also a symbol for romantic promise. At times, Daisy and Jordan are “like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses,” (Fitzgerald 8) and Daisy “gleams like silver” (Fitzgerald 150). Of course, Gatsby would see a lot of silver throughout the story because he is filled with such romantic promise. However, a color to yank his dreams away is the color blue which is always with him. Blue means depression, and it is always secretly with Gatsby no matter how hard he tries to live his dreams, it is one of his realities.

Green is the color of hopes and dreams. It is perhaps the most powerful and meaningful color be...

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...ich can’t hold Daisy’s interest long enough to make her stay” (Kersh). Yellow stains everything and corrupts all pure colors. It taints Gatsby’s dreams and is the harshest reality he faces. Since the beginning, Gatsby was doomed to fall. He was blind to all other colors but green, and the hope of it was still tainted by the yellow and corruption around him. At first, green was new, fresh, and beautiful. It was exciting, and full of promise. Green was “bursting with desire and imagination as if his dream was a newly blossoming flower” (Kersh). The reality destroys it. The green and dreams fade like smoke. The green light is now no more than just a memory and will be forgotten. In his pursuit of his dream, Gatsby doesn’t see any other color but green and he reaches for the green light, which flickers uncertainly just like Daisy and how she never lives up to his dream.