What Does The Color Gold Symbolize In The Great Gatsby

1245 Words3 Pages

Colors play a major role in our lives whether we know it or not. Some people think everyone sees every color differently, but no matter how we see them they mean something to us. Different colors can have different meanings depending on the person and their location. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, he uses color symbolism to foreshadow and represent ideas throughout the story. Fitzgerald mainly uses the colors gold, white, and green to tell the story through the eyes of someone living during the same time period as the novel. In Fitzgerald’s novel, the use of the color gold is to represent wealth, joy, success, preciousness, and death. Gold plays a major role throughout the novel and is seemed to be valued. One use of the color gold occurs when Nick is speaking to Jordan, “With Jordan’s slender …show more content…

In this quotation, the use of gold towards Jordan’s arm shows that it is valuable because she is an amazing golf player. Gold here represents something valuable and helps the reader understand how well of a golfer Jordan seems to be to the public. Fitzgerald also uses gold to represent happiness. The use of the color gold appears again when opening windows in the house, "we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey-turning, gold-turning light" (Fitzgerald 144). The use of gold here represents happiness because it shows the sunlight coming of as beautiful rays of golden sunlight. The weather in the novel represents the characters’ emotions, so if it is sunny (golden) then the characters are happy. In the novel, Gatsby, a main character, is often associated with the color gold for his wealth. “Yellow is the color of gold, which symbolizes money, materialism and high social position” (Haibing). In this quotation, Haibing goes on to explain how the color gold represents a high social position. This proves why Fitzgerald

Open Document